James Cohan Gallery Shanghai presents Day and Night, an exhibition of works with Spencer Finch and paintings by Byron Kim. This is the first exhibition of works by these New York-based artists in Shanghai.

The exhibition Day and Night brings together two artists from the gallery’s program who share broad, investigative interests in the phenomenon of color, light, and perceptual experience. For more than twenty years, Spencer Finch’s works have addressed the desire to frame our experiences of the natural and urban world. In site-specific installations, drawings, photographs, and sculpture, Finch combines a scientific approach, using precise calibrations and calculations, with his nuanced sense of poetic exploration of nature, the passage of time, and the endless powers of observation. On view in will be a selection of works, including Winter Light, Paris—Dusk, 2013 from the artist’s ongoing series of light boxes that recreate the color of light in a designated place at a specific time of day. Also on view are Finch’s dislocating digital color photographs Optical Studies where the he photographed the reflections of the surrounding trees and sky in the glassy waters of the lily ponds at Giverny that inspired Monet’s famous works. “There is always a paradox inherent in vision, an impossible desire to see yourself seeing,” Finch has said. “A lot of my work probes this tension; to want to see, but not being able to.” Finch observes, documents, and studies with scientific precision (often using a colorimeter) the color and light effects of specific locations, much in the manner of Impressionist painter Claude Monet whom Finch considers a major influence on his work.

In a recent and ongoing series of works, Byron Kim paints night in the city, capturing the quality of light and transition from dusk to total darkness. In Kim’s City Nights series he depicts a state of constant suspension that city dwellers experience. Like the artists he admires—Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko and Agnes Martin—Kim works in area one might call the abstract sublime. His works position themselves at the threshold between abstraction and representation, between conceptualism and pure painting, and whose underlying ideas often stem from politics to environmentalism to cultural identity. In his richly hued, minimalist works, Kim seeks to push the edges of what we understand as abstract painting, but on closer investigation and contemplation the night paintings reveal a charged spatial dimension, a kind of cerebral en plein-air that evokes a deep and calming sense of emptiness. These paintings, sometimes presented as single works, diptychs or triptychs, often have hard-edged, painted borders along two or three sides that act as architectural references suggesting windows or slight facades of buildings that frame our views of the city sky at night. Also on view are Kim’s Sunday Paintings, a series the artist has made nearly every Sunday since 2001. These relatively smaller canvases of sky-colored fields, some rendering full billowy or wispy cloud formations, also serve as brief chronicles or diary entries written across the individual canvases, something notating the artist’s inner thoughts about the making of his work, or the banality of running errands or doing chores during everyday life. The series was inspired by Kim's chance encounter with the writings of Chuang Tze, an early Daoist philosopher, who wrote about the relationship of the infinite to the infinitesimal. Kim translates this notion into a comparison between the vast sky and his weekly ritual as both a record and tribute to our days and to life itself.

-James Cohan Gallery Shanghai

Image: © Byron Kim