Villa Magdalena is pleased to present the exhibition Mie Yim: Mutants, a selection of recent work by Korean-born, New York-based artist Mie Yim. Over the past 10-15 years Yim’s artistic practice has embraced a strong stylistic shift. A mutation, in other words. The invented pastoral settings and anthropomorphic animals 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. She paints growing organisms, biomorphic entities that are in a state of flux. One could call them Mutants. In one picture, Hematoma, a red mass combining extraterrestrial and human features occupies the foreground and the majority of the picture plain. A quickly adaptable creature with an indefinite shape ready to absorb anything it encounters. This menacing presence is reminiscent of the figurative gestures and forms of Philip Guston or Peter Saul. 

 

While the latter work explores the imaginary related to parasites and microscopic monsters, other pictures on view address a range of other themes. Lotus, a pink muscular painting with a distorted face engulfed by limbs and tubular forms, is inspired by the artist’s memory of the lotus lamps in Buddhist temples she would visit as a kid in Korea. SPQR, is a reference to Ancient Rome and suggests the collapse of civilization, a topic which in these times has an intriguing parallel with the drastic societal changes caused by the Covid pandemic. 

 

Drawings are an essential component of Yim’s sensibility. Her works on paper are the origin of the majority of her paintings. The drawings on view present the artist’s personal mythological narratives and idiosyncratic spirit world. In these works, gods, humans, and nature all blend into the same aesthetic fabric. Her visual language is in dialogue with Korean Shamanism, a pre-modern religion where every object and feature of the natural world possesses a spirit; something that is quickly fading in the country’s current society. The influence of this ancient underlying practice is manifested in the artist’s subconscious. Some of these drawings feel like portraits, others are suspended abstractions, deconstructed animals, celestial creatures with rearranged anatomies. The variety of these works seem infinite; however, they are all inextricably linked and from the same place. 

 

Mie Yim’s last solo show, Psychotropic Dance, was held at Olympia, a new gallery in New York City’s Lower East Side. Mutants at Villa Magdalena will be the artist’s first solo show in Spain and the first time she will be exhibiting her work outside of the United States in over a decade.