The works
Images of the sky at the bottom of a spiral, stones from millennia-old rivers bending metal or shattering glass, touches of paint that we can't tell if they're real, fragments of time ginned up on canvas...
Relatum - Sky underneath
In collaboration with Tadao Ando
Skyunderneath
2022
Created by Korean artist Lee Ufan, who has been attached to Arles since a 2013 exhibition in the Saint-Laurent-Le Capitole chapel, this exhibition center is both a museum displaying the artist's historical and recent work, but also a place to live and support artistic and cultural activities.
The works of Lee Ufan, a Korean-born painter, sculptor, poet and philosopher born in 1936, act as revelators. They draw attention to materials, to emptiness or to the distance between two elements, to reflections and shadows: everything that we may not have seen at first glance, and yet which is part of the work of art.
At the crossroads of three cultures (those of Korea, Japan where he studied and lives, and France where he also lives part of the year), Lee Ufan's work is universal.
His sculptures, which he calls Relatum, are the result of "encounters": for example between a natural material (stones, linen, ...), an industrial material forged by man (steel plates, glass ...) and a space.
They lead us to meditate not so much on what the artist has done, but more broadly on the relationship between man and nature.
Relatum - The stage
The stage
2022
His paintings, sometimes worked in series over several decades, are also the support of reflections on time, on gesture, on the relationship between the full and the empty. Personal expression has faded into a regularly renewed quest for infinity.
Dialogue
2016 & 2018
