MIE YIM: TERRA INCOGNITA

Plaza de San Nicolas 2, Madrid

September 11 - October 18, 2025

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Villa Magdalena is pleased to announce Mie Yim: Terra Incognita. This marks Mie Yim’s (b. 1963, Seoul) second solo show at Villa Magdalena and her first exhibition at our new Madrid location following her first presentation with the gallery Mie Yim: Mutants in 2021 in San Sebastian.

This presentation is a small survey of recent bodies of work including paintings, watercolors and a site-specific mural. The title alludes to the idea of being in constant search and never settling, as if exploring an unfamiliar territory. While it evokes the geographic, the show turns inward, creating an intimate space, almost like a small cocoon.

On view is the full range of Yim’s pictorial imagination. Filled with symbolism which weaves the autobiographical with the art historical, Yim has created a biomorphic language that is both personal and universal. This exhibition deals with the celestial and the terrestrial at once, reconstructing through her unique vision earth, the heavens, and the cosmos. We begin with a site-specific mural, rendered with pastels in a dark purple shade which evokes twilight. Here the perspective is cosmic and infinite: a figure which resembles an angel guides us through the artist’s notion of the universe and consequentially the cycle of life. Totemic themes such as birth, transformation, decay and death are infused with loose interpretations and elements of various sources: Guston, Gustave Moreau’s Oedipus and the Sphinx, Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, Hieronymus Bosch just to name a few.

The anthropomorphic animals that defined the artist’s work in the early 2000s -often symbolizing lost innocence, a fallen paradise, or even an ex- istential crisis- have largely been set aside in favor of a more visceral and diverse approach. While traces of these soft, fuzzy figures still linger, this suite of canvases explores a wide range of compositions and subjects. The paintings on view in the second room are abstractions, evoking the microscopic, dystopian fantasies, artificial intelligence, nightclubs, and distant places from memory.

A group of framed watercolors in the last room comes as a result of the artist’s recent summer residency at the BAU Institute in Cassis, where Yim’s meditations centered on the highest sea cliff in France, Cap Canaille. A symbol of monumental beauty with an underlying darkness, as the artist puts it, “death is always around the corner.” The cliff is the perfect paradox, sublime and simultaneously sinister. Formally, the giant rock’s lines of craggy limestone, layers of growth with succulents and other forms of life make it a very suitable subject for the artist. This natural wonder embodies the kind of tension between opposites that has long fueled Mie Yim’s imaginary.

Mie Yim is a New York-based Korean artist working primarily in painting, drawing, site-specific murals and occasionally other media. Known for her mutant imagery, the juxtaposition of brilliant colors and dramatic content is a fundamental feature of the artist’s notion of beauty — which is almost always accompanied by an underlying sense of horror. Yim’s mode of expression bridges compelling dichotomies: luminosity and darkness, artificiality and organic matter, order and chaos, harmony and violence.

Recent solo exhibitions include: Spiked Garden (Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY, USA 2025), Inferno (Jupiter Contemporary, Miami Beach, FL, USA, 2024), Nightshade (Simone Subal Gallery, New York, NY, USA, 2023), Belladonna (Olympia Gallery, New York, NY, 2023), Mie Yim: Saints, Shamans, and Batshit Crazies (Inna Art Space, Hangzhou, China, 2023), Fluid Boundaries (Brattleboro Art Museum, Brattleboro, VT, USA, 2022), Mie Yim: New Works on Paper (Villa Magdalena hosted by Galeria Mascota, CDMX, Mexico, 2022), Mie Yim: Mutants (Villa Magdalena, Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain, 2021). Recent group shows include: Wonderland (Lehman Maupin, Seoul, South Korea, 2024), Cathartic Creatures (Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, CA, USA, 2023), and Notions (Canada, New York, NY, USA, 2023).