nam kim

Her painting is inspired by European art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as well as modern artists such as Henri Matisse, Marsden Hartley, Paula Modersohn-Becker and David Hockney. In doing so, she reflects in an ambivalent way the longing for a return to ‘origins’. Kim’s hybrid painting oscillates between intuition, self-reflection, authentic expression and a mediatised, increasingly virtual world in which images and identities are recycled, recombined, morphed and simulated. 

The often muscular, heroic figures appear as painterly avatars of the artist herself. The bodies are physical, but at the same time purely formal elements, building blocks for the composition. They suggest community but are isolated, absorbed in contemplation of their inner selves. On closer inspection they appear strangely flat, not at all physical, becoming, like the landscape, part of an all-over of ornaments and geometric patterns, serving the atmosphere, the construction of the picture. In fact, Kim begins her paintings as a form of abstract gestural painting, from which she models and carves out the bodies in an almost sculptural manner. Her non-binary protagonists reflect a kind of Modernity 2.0 in a very contemporary way, a notion of the self that changes with every light, forming temporary communities that constantly produce new, multi-perspective constellations.