Mison Kim
Now and Then and Again
5/1/26 - 6/5/26
48+ Site Specific grid painting installation, 2026
Then and Now and Again
Mison Kim
Mison Kim’s grid paintings are interconnected. The geometric and organic forms weave together, following and breaking from their grid format. Shaped forms move across the physical grid of canvases but never sit still within it. The grid is steady and architectural but the compositions slide over it, finding their own confident positions. Kim’s line work offers a counterpoint. It is dense, thready, obsessive. Drawn by hand, it moves intuitively. Tangled, searching, and precise all at once. Where the flat color blocking feels declarative, the line feels lived-in. The two meet without canceling each other out. Structure and free flow find a way to hold together.
The grid does not restrain. It scaffolds and softens at the edges, holding rhythm and energy in place while allowing for drift, overlap, and secondary compositions to emerge. There are bursts and there is restraint. Flat, open areas sit beside tightly worked clusters. The paintings feel at once architectural and organic—like something built and something grown.
Time is embedded in the work. The drawings carry hours, days, a daily practice that reads like a journal. Today, yesterday and tomorrow, histories of process are layered and continuous. The repetition is not static; it accumulates, loops, and shifts. Like a symphony, the work moves between loud, dramatic passages and quieter, sustained moments of intensity.
48+
A grid-based project in the back gallery emphasizes connection and change over time. Composed of individual squares mounted on a larger painted mural framework, the underlying structure of Kim’s paintings, the piece will evolve over the course of the show. As works are taken out of the grid into the world, the patterned foundation becomes more visible, activating what remains.
Each square leaves with someone, carrying part of the whole with it. What begins as a unified field disperses, then reconnects through the people who hold it. By the end of the exhibition, the work exists both in the gallery and beyond it—linked through memory, ownership, and experience.
Then and Now and Again speaks to this cycle: the act of making, the passage of time, and the way we return to see something differently each time.
