How Madonna Became an Art World Icon https://ift.tt/l0FpVP2

Madonna, 1990
Patrick Demarchelier
Staley-Wise Gallery

The legend is a classic one: A 20-year-old Michigan college dropout lands in New York with $35 in her pocket and gets into a taxi for the first time in her life, telling the driver to drop her off at “the center of it all.”

Soon, the ambitious young Midwesterner would dye her hair blond and find herself at the center of the city’s creative scene. She would date Jean-Michel Basquiat, become close friends with Keith Haring, hang out with Larry Gagosian, collect Frida Kahlo works, and pose for Maripol. Somewhere along the way, she would also become the most famous singer in the world, known simply by her first name: Madonna.

On the eve of the 43rd Video Music Awards, where Madonna leads this year’s field with 11 nominations, Artsy looks back at the Queen of Pop’s unusually deep ties to the art world—and the artists, images, and ideas that have shaped her career.

A muse in the downtown scene

Madonna, NYC, 1980, 1980
Mick Rock
Avant Gallery

The center of it all during Madonna’s meteoric rise in the 1980s was her small but tightly knit downtown community. Living in a fifth-floor walk-up in Alphabet City, she quickly absorbed the neighborhood’s feverish creative output and became a fixture at now-legendary venues including Danceteria and the Roxy.

A Panel of Experts, 1982
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO)

It was within this milieu that perhaps the most valuable artwork featuring Madonna emerged, painted by her then-boyfriend Jean-Michel Basquiat. A Panel of Experts (1982), a largely black-and-white work in acrylic and oil pastel, bears Madonna’s name in its upper-left corner alongside that of Basquiat’s ex-girlfriend Suzanne Mallouk. At its center, two chunky figures appear to be fighting—an apparent reference to an altercation between the two women over Basquiat.

Now in the permanent collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the painting was reunited with its muse decades later when Madonna posed in front of it during its inclusion in the Barbican’s 2017 exhibition “Basquiat: Boom for Real.”

Making the Madonna image

Madonna (True Blue), 1986
Herb Ritts
CAMERA WORK

"Madonna at Window, NYC 1986", 1986
Herb Ritts
Izzy Gallery

If Madonna became one of the defining faces of 1980s pop culture, photographers and stylists helped fix that face in the collective imagination: ripped fishnets, heaps of bracelets, bleached hair, thick eyebrows, and a gaze that could turn provocation into a dare.

Her largely DIY style fascinated photographers including Herb Ritts and Patrick Demarchelier, but some of the era’s most intimate images came through the lens of Maripol, the French-born photographer, stylist, and downtown fixture who also helped construct the bridal-inflected look of Madonna’s Like a Virgin era.

Madonna (First Single), 1983
Maripol
Exploring the Arts Benefit Auction

A 2017 solo exhibition of Maripol’s work at Dundee Contemporary Arts captured Madonna on the brink of global takeover. The disarming Polaroids show an icon before the mythology had fully hardened: Madonna in bed in 1983; Madonna trying on a pink wig backstage in 1984. They are images of a superstar in formation.

The downtown language of street art

Eric Kroll - Madonna at Danceteria, NYC 1983 Memorial for Michael Stewart, 1983
Eric Kroll
Alpha 137 Gallery

Madonna also had unusually early access to graffiti and street art through her relationships with Basquiat and Haring. During the years when Haring was painting murals at era-defining nightclubs such as the Palladium and Danceteria, Madonna was performing at many of the same venues, trying to make early hits such as “Holiday” and “Everybody” heard.

When her first major nationwide concert run, the Virgin Tour, wrapped in 1985, she held its after-party at the Palladium, with her friend’s work looming in the background.

That friendship was inseparable from activism. As HIV/AIDS was met with intense stigma and governmental neglect, Madonna became an outspoken supporter of AIDS research and fundraising. She frequently appeared at benefit events alongside Haring and other members of their downtown circle, including Kenny Scharf.

Madonna, 2009
Mr. Brainwash
Rago/Wright/LAMA/Toomey & Co.

Keith Haring Andy Warhol record cover art (after Keith Haring Andy Warhol Madonna), ca. 1986
Keith Haring, Andy Warhol
Lot 180 Gallery

Decades later, she returned to the visual language of street art for the cover of her 2009 greatest-hits album Celebration, for which Mr. Brainwash transformed her image into a brightly colored, stencil-like portrait. The Pop palette inevitably evokes Andy Warhol, another figure in Madonna’s orbit and a guest at her 1985 wedding to Sean Penn.

Warhol and Haring even collaborated on a wedding gift for the couple: four works that transformed New York Post covers about the publication of Madonna’s nude photographs into playful Pop art artifacts. The tabloid image, already central to Madonna’s career, became an art object.

The collector behind the pop star

Madonna’s relationship with art was not confined to the people around her. Long before she could afford to collect it, she was looking.

As a teenager, she encountered Frida Kahlo through black-and-white photographs at the Detroit Institute of Arts. She later recalled walking past the museum’s Diego Rivera murals to look at images of Kahlo in her studio, captivated by the Mexican artist’s “self-possession and unique beauty.”

During her first month in New York, with money still scarce, Madonna spent part of her budget on a postcard of Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Monkey (1940), which she came to regard as a kind of “guardian angel.”

Frida Kahlo, 1931
Imogen Cunningham
Atlas Gallery

Picasso, 1932 (printed 1981)
Man Ray
L’SPACE Gallery

Years later, the actual painting became hers. Madonna acquired Self-Portrait with Monkey at auction in the late 1980s and loaned it to Tate Modern for its 2001 Kahlo survey. Around a decade later, she deepened her holdings with another of Kahlo’s most visceral works, My Birth (1932), acquired through a private sale.

It is easy to see what Madonna found in Kahlo: an artist who fashioned autobiography, physicality, sexuality, and pain into an uncompromising public image. Those same forces have run through Madonna’s own career, which has repeatedly tested the standards imposed on women’s bodies and turned sexuality into both spectacle and a means of self-authorship.

Kahlo is far from the only modernist in Madonna’s collection. Works by Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Man Ray, and Tamara de Lempicka have also been reported among her holdings.

From collector to collaborator

Madonna’s engagement with art has never stopped at ownership. Over the decades, she has maintained an unusually active network of friendships, collaborations, and partnerships with living artists.

The forms of that support vary considerably. In 1997, she sponsored MoMA’s exhibition “Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills.” In 2001, she presented the Turner Prize to Martin Creed during a live broadcast. And in 2017, she joined Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak and artist Marilyn Minter for a public discussion about feminism and art.

Minter is also represented in Madonna’s collection, as is Tracey Emin. Madonna owns Emin’s 2001 mixed-media work It Just Happens, a characteristically unguarded declaration of desire and autonomy, qualities that readily rhyme with Madonna’s own creative persona.

Madonna : Time lapse photograph spiritual value, 1998
David LaChapelle
Eternity Gallery

Her relationships with artists continue to evolve. During a visit last year to Emin’s foundation in Margate, England, Madonna met with young artists in residence—and did not leave empty-handed. Works she encountered there, including sculptures by Brazilian artist Anderson Asteclines and a small painting by Ethiopian artist Kirubel Mandefro, now hang in her London townhouse.

The gesture says something about the kind of collector Madonna has become. Her interest is not restricted to trophies by canonical names. The same curiosity that once drew her toward artists in downtown New York still appears to guide her toward work being made now.

When art becomes material

For another pop star, name-checking an artist in a lyric or borrowing an artwork for a stage set might read as cultural signaling. With Madonna, the relationship is harder to separate from the work itself. She did not observe the downtown culture that produced Basquiat, Haring, Scharf, and Julian Schnabel from a distance. She emerged from inside it.

In that sense, Madonna was not simply a muse to artists. She adopted one of their fundamental strategies: treating the self as material. Her body, clothes, sexuality, religion, celebrity, and public image became things to be constructed, dismantled, quoted, and reconstructed again.

Art history consequently surfaces throughout her career almost as a second visual language. Horst P. Horst’s photographs famously informed the video for “Vogue,” while the imagery surrounding “Open Your Heart” drew heavily on the paintings of de Lempicka. Minter’s Green Pink Caviar (2009) became a video backdrop on Madonna’s Sticky & Sweet Tour, while animated versions of Haring’s radiant figures appeared elsewhere in the show.

Helen Bennett, Cape, 1936
Horst P. Horst
Robert Klein Gallery

Femme a la Mandoline, circa 1933
Tamara de Lempicka
Heritage Auctions

More recently, the references have migrated into the lyrics themselves. On 2012’s “I Fucked Up,” Madonna imagines an unrealized domestic future: “We coulda bought a house with a swimming pool / Filled it up with Warhols, it would be so cool.”

But perhaps no song makes the relationship between Madonna and the art world as explicit as her recent single “Danceteria.” Released this summer, the track looks back at the scene from which she emerged, name-checking Haring, Basquiat, Maripol, Fab Five Freddy, Scharf, and powerful downtown dealer Tony Shafrazi.

It plays almost like an oral history set to a dance beat. More than four decades after Madonna arrived in New York asking to be taken to “the center of it all,” “Danceteria” makes the case that she did not simply find that center. She was part of what made it one.

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The Met to stage major Felix Gonzales-Torres exhibition in summer 2027. https://ift.tt/G4RdMpw

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will stage the first major New York survey of Felix Gonzalez-Torres's work since 1995, opening in summer 2027.

“Felix Gonzalez-Torres: The Spaces Between,” on view June 10th through October 18th, 2027, will present more than 40 works by the Cuban-born American visual artist encompassing installation, painting, photography, sculpture, and video, drawn from public and private collections.

Included in the exhibition will be defining works such as, "Untitled" (Go-Go Dancing Platform) (1991) which consists of an empty blue platform ringed with 48 lightbulbs that is briefly activated once per day by a lamé-clad go-go dancer; "Untitled" (Perfect Lovers) (1987–1990), twin battery-powered clocks which are initially set to the same time and slowly desynchronize; and "Untitled" (Revenge) (1991) a continuously replenished pile of blue candies in clear wrappers.

Rather than a conventional monographic show, the exhibition will place works within the Museum’s permanent collection galleries, ranging from Egyptian art and medieval art to historic British interiors.

“Felix Gonzalez-Torres is one of the most important artists of the 20th century. His installations transform ephemeral materials into enduring experiences that grapple with ideas such as time, loss, and love,” said Max Hollein, the Met's director and CEO. “For the first presentation of the artist in New York City in over three decades, the Met will showcase his art throughout the museum, in conversation with 5,000 years of human creativity.”

Untitled, 1994
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Carolina Nitsch Contemporary Art

The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago, which will mount a simultaneous, distinct exhibition, “This Work Cannot Be Destroyed.”

David Breslin, curator of modern and contemporary Art, who organized the show with curator Ann Goldstein, described Gonzalez-Torres's work as inseparable from the crisis that shaped it. “The AIDS crisis was the crucible that forged his resolute conceptual clarity, and his brilliance was creating an open-ended body of work where new meanings can be embedded into historical ones,” Breslin said.

Goldstein, who is now interim director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, co-organized the artist's first major survey in 1994. Three decades after his death, she remarked that the work remains “simultaneously deceptively beautiful and rigorously acute, defiantly romantic and precisely analytical—and uncannily present.” The exhibition's title is drawn from a 1994 fax Gonzalez-Torres sent his friend and gallerist Andrea Rosen, quoting the poet Elizabeth Bishop, “I watched closely the spaces between the birds.”

Born in Guáimaro, Cuba, in 1957, Gonzalez-Torres left the country as a child, living briefly in Spain and then Puerto Rico before settling in New York in 1979. He attended the Whitney Independent Study Program and earned his BFA from the Pratt Institute, and from 1987 to 1994 was a member of Group Material, the politically engaged artists' collective co-founded by Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, and Tim Rollins. His best-known works invite viewers to physically deplete them, taking a candy from a seemingly endless pile, or a sheet from a towering stack of paper, turning gallerygoers into collaborators in works about circulation, loss, and the boundary between public and private life. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1996, at 38.

Interest in Gonzalez-Torres’s work has surged this year. A large survey at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, “Dulce Venganza” (“Sweet Revenge”), co-curated by Nancy Spector and Alejandro Cesarco, gathers more than 50 works through October 12th and has drawn attention for how directly the artist’s warnings about “encroaching conservative forces in government,” as Spector has put it, resonate today.

In February, the Fundación Fernando Romero staged an exhibition at Mexico City's La Cuadra San Cristóbal, the Luis Barragán–designed house, pairing Gonzalez-Torres’s beaded curtains, mirrors, and light strings with Barragán’s architecture in what curators called “a poetic dialogue” between two artists who never met.

Gonzalez-Torres himself pointed to art's transformative power in his own writing. Describing a visit to see Roni Horn’s Gold Field (1982) with his partner, Ross Laycock, as Laycock was dying of AIDS-related illness, he wrote that the work was “a new landscape, a possible horizon, a place of rest and absolute beauty.”

An accompanying catalogue will include newly commissioned texts by Breslin, Goldstein, Paulina Pobocha of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Samuel Shapiro of the Met.

Gonzalez-Torres described his intentions simply, “Above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was here. I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid. I was hopeful. I had an idea and I had a good purpose and that's why I made works of art.”

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Painter Emily Mae Smith's Surreal Visions Embrace the Dark Side https://ift.tt/s49lfgy

Painter Emily Mae Smith believes that in dark times, it’s best to embrace the shadows.

Last week, the artist—best known for her surrealistic paintings of anthropomorphized broomsticks—opened “Transit of Venus” at Petzel Gallery. It’s her first solo exhibition in New York in over four years, on view through October 24, 2026.

The anticipated show brings together 15 new oil paintings and two carved benches made from 2023 to 2026. The works range in scale from the handheld to the monumental and embrace a dizzying range of formal strategies. Smith reprises her saucy broomsticks, revels in hyperrealism, and takes inspiration from French agrarian tableaux.

These varied works are united by Smith’s use of deep shadow and how she sees that shadow in relationship to painting. In the canvas Becoming Neolithic (2026), one of the first works Smith conceptualized while building the show, a towering thicket looms over snowy ground. Hands emerge from its stalks with seeking gestures, reaching toward the sky. The scene is backlit by a setting winter sun. In the foreground, a fox treads over the shadowed snow. It’s one of many paintings in the show that positions the viewer in a place of darkness.

Becoming Neolithic, 2026
Emily Mae Smith
Petzel Gallery

Midnight Assembly, 2023-2026
Emily Mae Smith
Petzel Gallery

“Culturally, we’re in the shadow,” Smith said as she walked through the show ahead of its opening last week. “We’re in a Jungian shadow-reveal sort of space as a society,” where “repressed desires become desperate grabs of power.” She feels a sense of obligation to explore this territory. “Whether or not we want to go there, it’s there. We have to explore it,” she said. “Painting the light from behind is a way of saying: I am the dark side of the image—I’m working from the other side.”

In the years since “Heretic Lace,” Smith’s last exhibition with Petzel in 2022, the artist has relocated from New York City to the Hudson Valley. She now works in a studio in Kingston, New York, where she feels more connected than ever to her natural environment. At the same time, she feels throttled by the pitch of U.S. political upheavals and speed of visual consumption through social media.

In another new painting, Only Human (2026), a bunch of grapes appear in translucent, noxious hues of purple, green, blue, and red. Inside each grape is a human eyeball, sloshing in turbulent water. The grape motif (which reappears in Shadow Land Zeuxis, (2026)) references a classical story about the conflation of reality and illusion. Smith’s painting is simultaneously funny and disturbing and visualizes the pressures of the attention economy, resulting in a frantic, superficial, and distracted mode of existence, with eyes unsure where to turn.

In these times, Smith believes painting can, at the very least, offer a sense of orientation. The exhibition title “Transit of Venus” refers to a rare astronomical event in which the planet Venus passes directly between the Sun and Earth. The planet appears as a small dark spot moving across the face of the solar disk. These transits occur in pairs eight years apart, with more than a century separating each pair. Historically, astronomers used the transit of Venus to calculate the distance between Earth and the Sun. These measurements helped establish the scale of the solar system—and, essentially, our understanding of our place in the universe.

Smith’s paintings formally reflect this idea. “Venus moves across in front of the Sun and becomes a little black dot. That effect connects to the use of backlighting in my work and the way we can know ourselves by seeing something moving in front of us,” she explained.

For the artist, it’s essential to imagine ourselves as bodies in motion, to embrace transformation amid rising authoritarianism in the U.S. “Trying to stay unfixed is a purposeful way to resist the painful transformation we’re having in society right now,” she said. “Being unfixed is dangerous, and people want to eliminate it.” For Smith, the “Venus” of the exhibition title refers equally to the Roman goddess, herself an adaptation of Aphrodite, and a historical embodiment of this embrace of ambiguity and multiplicity. “Venus was used by different people, for different reasons, across time and history,” the artist said.

Smith’s anthropomorphized broomsticks have long served as a nod to the historic position of women in the arts, a winking reference to feminine labor and the male gaze. In this exhibition, Smith’s most iconic motif loosens and morphs, at times, into a Venus-like figure. She sees her painting Becoming Neolithic as an adaptation of the broomstick, as well as The Locust II (2026), which reimagines the 1872 painting The Grasshopper (La Cigale) by French painter Jules Joseph Lefebvre. While Lefebvre renders his nubile young woman as helpless, cowering, naked, and alone, Smith gives her a broomstick and a scythe that serve as a protective weapons. In the painting Venus (Inner Vision) (2026) meanwhile, Smith makes the handle of her torso-like broomstick translucent. The figure’s organs—brain, liver, stomach—and circulatory system are visible, like a version of the “anatomical Venuses” created in 18th-century Florence, wax visions of idealized young women used to teach anatomy. “I wanted to take the idea of a Venus and literally give her interiority,” said the artist.

In these paintings, translucency aids in Smith’s attempt to reenchant people with the magic of painting. “I wish people would consider what it takes to make a painting, and how painting can exist in the world in a complex, fabulous, magical way, and not just as trading cards on the internet, or auction-house commodities,” she said. “So there’s this desire to see inside and make that beautiful.”

Understanding the materiality of painting, she thinks, might be one way to do that. In Sacred Conversation (2026), Smith brings together the animals and plants whose materials become the tools of painting—from badger and sable hair used in brushes to walnut oil, flax, cotton, and cuttlefish-derived sepia. The imagined ecosystem of creatures that could never coexist in nature becomes a kind of portrait of painting itself and its entanglement with the natural world. The structure of the painting, meanwhile, riffs on paintings by Giovanni Bellini and the Renaissance tradition of the sacra conversazione, the gathering of saints. It is a moment of bright light among shadows.

Smith believes that we are living through a moment of societal transformation whose repercussions are still coming into view. “In my last show, I was really interested in my place in painting as a person, as a woman painter, in my own time—how do I belong, what are the problems of trying to belong inside this thing,” Smith said. “Now, I’m asking, what is a painting to the world right now, when it all feels like it’s on fire?”

One of the final works completed for the show, The Changeling (2026), depicts a foot held aloft against the dark sky. It transforms from flesh to straw, and a hand reaches toward it with a lit match, like an inverse of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam (ca. 1512) . Flames are imminent. But they also bring much-needed illumination.

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MSCHF transforms two Lexus electrified vehicles into surreal sculptures. https://ift.tt/3GWtski

MSCHF, the Brooklyn-based conceptual art collective represented by Perrotin, will debut a pair of surreal new car sculptures in New York this week as part of a collaboration with Lexus.

The works reconfigure two of the automaker's electrified vehicles for the exhibition “Motomorphosis,” which opens this week at Chelsea Industrial during Armory Week. The show pairs each unaltered vehicle with its distorted double. A Lexus RZ450e appears once as itself and again as Circle Car, looped nose-to-tail into an endless, driving circle, while a Lexus RX450h+ is shown alongside Twisted Car, its body pulled into dramatic longitudinal torsion.

MSCHF describes the works as “Form Cars,’ positioned as an inversion of the automotive industry’s "Concept Car" prototypes. Kevin Wiesner, the collective's chief creative officer and a founding member, told Highsnobiety the project drew on the vocabulary of 3D animation, where forms bend and stretch without being fixed, as well as on a lineage of car-as-medium artworks in the United States, such as Pippa Garner's sculpture and performance Backwards Car (1974). “We had the idea of inverting the Concept Car and taking a purely Formalist approach to the object,” Wiesner said.

Despite their seemingly impossible shapes, the sculptures were built using conventional auto-body techniques—a steel armature built up with thousands of individual pieces, then finished with the paint and Bondo overcoat typical of a body shop. Some components, Wiesner said, are actual Lexus parts, "but they're sculptures, not cars."

Lexus has framed the collaboration around what it calls "Electric Made Art," treating electrification itself as an artistic medium rather than a purely functional one. "Most conversations about electrification focus on how a vehicle is powered. ‘Motomorphosis’ asks a different question: what can electricity power in our imagination?" said Lisa McQueen, Lexus's senior manager of marketing. "Working with MSCHF allowed us to take the automobile beyond its familiar form and explore movement, transformation and possibility in an entirely new way."

“Motomorphosis” will have a public opening the evening of Thursday, September 24th, and will be on view Friday, September 25th, and Saturday, September 26th.

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9 Artists Who Shaped Korea’s Dansaekhwa Movement https://ift.tt/2i7hgnd

Blue-Umber ‘76, 1976
Yun Hyong-keun
PKM Gallery

In mid-20th-century South Korea, amid the economic hardship and political repression that followed the Korean War, a vanguard of abstract artists forged a radical new visual language. Pushing back against rigid, state-sanctioned academic realism and breaking decisively from centuries of traditional fine-art ink painting, these artists sought an art form untethered from past conventions.

The Korean art critic Lee Yil curated a selection of their works into a groundbreaking group show at Tokyo Gallery in 1975; he coined the term Dansaekhwa in 1980 to define these nonfigurative works executed in understated, neutral hues.

Though the term translates to “monochrome painting,” the label is a misnomer. Dansaekhwa was never about the passive application of a single color. Rather than treating the canvas as a flat window for representation, these artists rejected Western compositional logic altogether, elevating process over final result and prioritizing physical labor as a form of spiritual meditation.

Through disciplined repetition—dragging gouges through wet paint, soaking and tearing traditional Hanji paper, or squeezing pigment through coarse hemp from behind, for example—they rendered the physical surface an arena of endurance and material transformation.

Meditation 91007, 1991
Chung Chang-Sup
Axel Vervoordt Gallery

Over the past decade, a surge of international retrospectives, such as the 2015 “Dansaekhwa” exhibition at the 56th Venice Biennale (curated by art historian Yongwoo Lee) and major market interest, have cemented Dansaekhwa as one of modern art history’s vital movements. This November, Phaidon will publish Dansaekhwa: Korean Abstract Art and Its Cultural Impact as well.

As the international art world recalibrates following another bustling edition of Frieze Seoul, global attention remains fixed on South Korea’s rich modern art legacy. Driven by landmark gallery retrospectives and major international surveys, from Venice to San Francisco and Seoul, Dansaekhwa continues to stand out as the defining cornerstone of Korean abstraction.

The following nine artists offer essential entry points to the movement.

Kim Whanki

B. 1913, Kijwa-do, Korea. D. 1974.

26-I-70, 1970
Kim Whanki
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)

Heaven and Earth 24-IX-73 #320, 1973
Kim Whanki
Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art

Pioneering modernist painter Kim Whanki is revered as the foundational precursor to Dansaekhwa. He was active between Seoul, Paris, and New York throughout his long and transformative career. Kim primarily worked on monumental oil canvases, filling his expansive surfaces with tens of thousands of small blue dots enclosed within tight, hand-drawn square grids. These sweeping abstract compositions, rendered in translucent washes of indigo, navy, and oceanic teal, evoke vast starry night skies or shimmering water as they bridge traditional Korean nature motifs (mountains, moon jars, and sky painting specifically) with Western modernism. The watery, ink-like transparency of his oil pigment creates a deeply atmospheric, meditative depth that immediately sets his work apart from American field painters.

By translating spiritual harmony into systematic markmaking, Kim laid the ideological groundwork for the generation of Korean abstract artists that followed. Today, the artist holds an unrivaled position at the apex of the Korean art market, setting a historic auction record in 2019 when his painting 05-IV-71 #200 (Universe) (1971) sold for over $10 million and became the most expensive artwork ever by a Korean artist. His monumental legacy is preserved at the dedicated Whanki Museum in Seoul, while key works anchor the permanent collections of major institutions such as the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Korea, and the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art.

Kwon Young-Woo

B. 1926, Riwon, Korea. D. 2013

Kwon Young-Woo was a Paris- and Seoul-based master who abandoned traditional ink brushes early in his career and worked with paper as a sculptural medium. Kwon used his fingers, fingernails, wooden tools, and scratch awls to tear, puncture, scratch, and layer multiple sheets of white hanji paper. His medium-to-large-scale monochromatic compositions feature rhythmic, torn incisions and subtle three-dimensional relief, occasionally accented by soft blurs of blue or dark ink seeping through from the reverse side. The resulting works resemble delicate, highly tactile topographies; the physical destruction of the paper becomes the generative act of creation.

Kwon forced a radical reevaluation of paper’s role in Korean and broader East Asian art history, bringing it into a modern context. His work was featured in the benchmark survey exhibition “Dansaekhwa” at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. Today, his tactile paper compositions are preserved in the permanent collections of major global institutions, including the MMCA in Seoul, the British Museum in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Chung Chang-Sup

B. 1927, Cheongju, Korea. D. 2011

Seoul-based painter and longtime academic Chung Chang-Sup spent decades investigating the raw, organic possibilities of tak, the natural mulberry bark fiber used to craft traditional Korean Hanji paper. Foregoing conventional oil paint, Chung soaked raw mulberry fibers in water, kneaded the wet pulp by hand, and pressed it directly onto large canvas stretchers. As the pulp dried, it formed surface cracks, fibrous ridges, and subtle folds that revealed the medium’s organic origins. His finished works present thick, sculptural surfaces in muted, earthy monochromatic tones of ivory, warm tan, charcoal, and slate gray. They often feature squares and rectilinear shapes embedded in their centers.

Chung viewed his labor-intensive process as unifying his own breath and physical effort with the natural material. His tactile approach to material heritage gained global prominence when he was featured in the historic collateral exhibition Dansaekhwa at the Palazzo Contarini-Polignac during the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. His works are now held in renowned international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Korea, the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, and M+ in Hong Kong.

Yun Hyoung-Keun

B. 1928, Cheongju, Korea. D. 2007

Yun Hyoung-Keun was a Seoul-based artist who produced some of the most emotionally resonant and understated works of the Dansaekhwa movement. Working on large, unprimed linen and raw cotton canvases, Yun applied wide, vertical bands of dark, heavily diluted oil paint using a signature mixture of burnt umber and ultramarine pigment. These towering dark pillars feature soft, feathery borders where the watery paint bleeds naturally into the untreated fabric, creating deep, gate-like architectural voids of near-black alongside raw cloth.

The resulting paintings feel monumental yet remarkably quiet, visually echoing the natural bleeding of traditional ink wash on absorbent paper. Informed by personal trauma during Korea’s post-war political turmoil (he went to prison and was nearly executed for participating in student movements), Yun’s work treated canvas as an acoustic chamber for grief and restraint.

His international stature was solidified by a landmark posthumous solo retrospective at Palazzo Fortuny during the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. His market momentum continues this September with a solo exhibition at PKM Gallery in Seoul, accompanying the historic restoration and public opening of his longtime residence and studio in the city. New York’s Judd Foundation will also open a solo show of his work on October 8th. Yun’s oeuvre is represented in major permanent collections worldwide, including the MMCA in Korea, Glenstone in Maryland, and Tate Britain.

Park Seo-Bo

B. 1931, Korea. D. 2023

Park Seo-Bo is recognized as the father of Dansaekhwa. He served as the movement’s theorist and organizing force, championing Korean art from his perch in Seoul until his passing. He is most famous for his lifelong “Écriture” series (1972–2023): In the 1980s, Park developed a technique of soaking sheets of traditional Hanji (mulberry paper) for weeks, layering it onto canvas, and pushing the wet pulp with his fingers, sticks, and rulers to build abstract, sculptural ridges, often referred to as Hanji “mountains.”

The artist’s early palette was restricted to unbleached white, inspired by the translucent purity of Korean Joseon porcelain, and deep matte black, recalling the soot lining traditional Korean kitchen hearths. Beginning in the early 2000s, Park introduced luminous hues drawn directly from nature, naming specific shades such as Maple Leaf Red, Canola Yellow, and Sky Gray.

Park saw this relentless, daily repetition as an exercise in self-erasure and spiritual healing for both the artist and the viewer. Seoul’s Kukje Gallery is currently celebrating his legacy with a retrospective that remains on view through October 18th. His footprint continues to expand with the recent opening of the Park Seo-Bo Memorial Museum in Seoul, alongside key acquisitions by prestigious institutions like Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Chung Sang-Hwa

B. 1932, Korea. D. 2025

Untitled 019-5-2, 2019
Chung Sang Hwa
Gallery Hyundai

Chung Sang-Hwa, who worked between Paris, Japan, and South Korea, was an internationally celebrated artist who approached painting as a labor-intensive ritual of construction and deconstruction. He coated large canvases with a thick mixture of kaolin clay and acrylic paste, let them dry, then methodically folded them into tight, uniform grid patterns. The rigid surfaces cracked, clay peeled away, and the artist refilled the empty geometric voids with oil paint.

Repeating this painstaking cycle dozens of times produced subtle, mosaic-like surfaces of off-whites, grays, or muted blues with intricate textural depth. Up close, Chung’s canvases reveal a complex relief of tile-like fragments that catch ambient room light. In 2021, Seoul’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) honored the artist with a sweeping solo retrospective. His works are permanently housed in major institutional collections across the globe, including the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., M+ in Hong Kong, and the MMCA in Korea.

Ha Chong-Hyun

B. 1935, Korea.

Conjunction 23-67, 2023
Ha Chong-hyun
Tina Kim Gallery

Seoul-based master Ha Chong-Hyun has revolutionized the physical mechanics of canvas painting through his long-running “Conjunction” series. The artist eschews traditional front-facing brushwork, instead applying thick, muted oil paint in shades of taupe, dark ocher, rust brown, and charcoal to the back of coarse burlap or hemp fabric. Using significant physical force, he squeezes the viscous pigment forward through the open weave of the fabric until it oozes out the front, where he scrapes, smears, or shapes the paint using trowels and palette knives. The final works feature heavy, sculptural impasto trails protruding from rough, unpainted burlap.

Ha’s unconventional technique turned painting inside out, transforming coarse industrial sacking into a tactile battlefield. His work reached milestone prominence in 2022, when Kukje Art and Culture Foundation organized a solo show at Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa as an official Collateral Event at the 59th Venice Biennale.

On September 25th, the artist will open a major presentation at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco: his first-ever North American retrospective. His pieces form an integral part of major permanent collections around the world, including MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, as well as the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Lee Ufan

B. 1936, Kyongnam, South Korea.

From Line, 1974
Lee Ufan
Upsilon Gallery

Lee Ufan is an internationally renowned painter, sculptor, and philosopher who splits his practice between Japan, France, and South Korea. Lee occupies a unique position in art history: while recognized as the key theoretical architect of Japan’s Mono-ha (School of Things) movement in the late 1960s, he simultaneously served as a vital international bridge for Dansaekhwa. Though scholars debate the artist’s exact categorization—his “Relatum” series of spare sculptures align with Mono-ha’s prioritization of physical, unmediated interactions between raw industrial materials and natural objects, while his rhythmic paintings share more with Dansaekhwa—Lee’s practice links both movements via a philosophical commitment to restraint and material dialogue.

To make his famous “From Point and From Line” series, Lee holds his breath for up to two minutes, synchronizing his body with his brushwork: His deliberate strokes of mineral pigment fade systematically across bare canvas.

Lee remains the most commercially successful living Korean artist, with benchmark works like East Winds (1984) achieving over 3.1 billion won ($2.7 million) at auction in 2021. His institutional footprint is secured by dedicated foundation spaces in Naoshima, Japan, Arles, France, and Busan, high-profile site-specific commissions at the Château de Versailles and the Hirshhorn Museum, and a retrospective organized by the Dia Art Foundation at SMAC Venice as an official Collateral Event of the 61st Venice Biennale this past year.

Lee Dong-Youb

B. 1946. D. 2013

Interspace, 2008
Lee Dong-Youb
The Columns Gallery

Interspace, 1980
Lee Dong-Youb
The Columns Gallery

Lee Dong-Youb represents the younger wave of artists associated with Dansaekhwa's initial push; he was included in Lee Yil’s seminal 1975 exhibition “Korea: Five Artists, Five Hinsek ‘White’” in Tokyo. The Seoul-based artist studied under Lee Ufan and was celebrated for his radically spare visual language. Lee’s signature “In-Between” series consists of expansive canvases covered in ultra-thin, translucent layers of pale white and soft gray paint. Applied with broad, whisper-light brushstrokes, his quiet gradations of tone leave vast, cloud-like central spaces that evoke open sky, architectural light, and infinite silence. The subtle shifts between pale pigment and bare canvas are so delicate that they require slow, contemplative viewing to register.

By stripping painting down to its most minimal atmospheric presence, Lee pushed monochrome abstraction to its logical extreme. The artist launched into prominence after winning the Grand Prize at the 1972 Seoul National Exhibition, establishing the second-generation trajectory of Korean monochrome abstraction. Today, his understated works are held in premier museum collections, including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Gwacheon, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT), and the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA).

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