Scottsdale, AZ - Threshold is the first solo museum exhibition of Byron Kim’s work, at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art [SMoCA] providing an overview of the artist’s career and presenting four major bodies of paintings that he has produced since 1989.  Kim came of age as an artist in the early 1990s, at a time when the force of multiculturalism met the mainstream art world head on.  He revitalized the refined practice of monochromatic abstract painting and made it newly meaningful.  Kim reconsiders the heroic (and elite) history of postwar American abstract painting and its claims to the sublime.  He brings a more humble, down-to-earth approach to abstract painting in contrast to the highfalutin discourse of his artistic forefathers."

Within the difficult to grasp genre of abstract painting, Kim inserts autobiographical references and holds to a firm belief in the ability of art to transcend the mundane material world.  His first landmark painting Synecdoche, included in this exhibition and featured in the 1993 Whitney Biennial, is one of the pivotal works of the 1990s.  The painting comprises a grid of nearly 400 monochromatic panels, each corresponding to the skin tone of a friend or acquaintance: it is a study in subtlety, a minimalist group portrait that raises issues of race and community.  It is also the artist’s wry pun on modern painters’ preoccupation with the painting’s surface, or “skin.”  Although the painting fits partially into both camps, it doesn’t fit entirely into any one category.  Instead, it occupies a unique position between the two, what Kim calls a ‘threshold.’  A position he has consciously attempted to occupy throughout his career, without attaching a name to it until recently.  The concept of ‘threshold’ provides a lens through which to regard this overview of Kim’s paintings.”

Color continues to dominate Kim’s work in its various aspects — as fact, as signifier, and as metaphor.  These include works whose colors pinpoint particular events and places—a container of memory— both personal and cultural.  For the presentation of Threshold at SMoCA, Kim is creating a new painting directly on the gallery wall, based on his careful observation of the magnificent Arizona night sky during his extended stay at Arcosanti, generously made possible by Donna and Howard Stone. 

Byron Kim, who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, was born in La Jolla, California, in 1961.  He studied art at Yale and at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.  Exhibition October 14, 2006 – January 7, 2007. 

Kim’s exhibition originated at the Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, and has traveled to the Samsung Museum of Modern Art, Seoul; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, California; Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro; and The Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle.

Visit The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art at : www.smoca.org