MIE YIM

Over the past 10-15 years Mie Yim’s (Seoul, 1963) artistic practice has embraced a strong stylistic shift. The invented pastoral settings and anthropomorphic animals – predominantly bunnies and bears – that used to define her paintings and drawings have been abandoned in favor of a more non-representational approach. In her recent work, a strong tension exists between recognizable imagery and mutating forms with thick surfaces that resonate more with abstraction. Many layers of paint add a built-up quality which almost makes Yim’s technique feel sculptural, something that is clearly evoked in this excerpt by the artist from 2018, “I construct the paintings out of horizontal and vertical lines like scaffoldings or skeletons”. The juxtaposition of brilliant colors and dramatic content is a reoccurring feature of the artist’s notion of beauty  – which is almost always accompanied by an underlying sense of horror. Her pictorial imagination includes natural deities, parasites, characters consumed by vegetal forms, animated compositions floating in space. Yim’s subjects are hazy and fuzzy like her fragmented memory of childhood; caused by hasty migration to the U.S. at a young age. 

Mutants at Villa Magdalena was the artist's first solo show in Spain, and the first time she exhibited her work outside of the United States in over a decade.