Abstraction in dialogue: Kim Whanki's dots, Adolph Gottlieb's bursts

Adolph Gottlieb's "Red vs Blue" (1972) / Courtesy of Adolph and Esther
Gottlieb Foundation / Licensed by
VAGA at ARS, New York

It was in 1963, at the São Paulo Biennale in Brazil, that two abstractionists from opposite ends of the world first crossed paths. That year, each representing their nation’s pavilion, Korea’s Kim Whanki (1913-74) received an honorary prize, while American artist Adolph Gottlieb (1903-74) was awarded the Grand Prix.

No record remains to tell whether the two actually came face-to-face at the international event, yet it was Gottlieb’s paintings that kindled a turning point in Kim’s life. Soon after, at the age of 50, Kim set out across the ocean for New York — a city where Gottlieb already stood as a pillar of the New York School alongside Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. There, Kim eventually entered the most defining phase of his career, birthing his now instantly recognizable pointillist paintings awash with an infinite constellation of dots.

Kim Whanki's "Untitled" (1971) / Courtesy of Whanki
Foundation and Whanki
Museum

“The Language of Abstraction, The Universe of Emotion” at Pace Gallery Seoul gathers the works of these two 20th-century masters under one roof in a resonant dialogue.

Organized in collaboration with the Whanki Foundation and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, the show illuminates how two painters of the East and the West each translated their visions into a shared language of abstraction.

Unfurled across the gallery’s second floor are Kim’s canvases from the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Installation view of Kim Whanki's paintings at Pace Gallery Seoul's "The Language of Abstraction, The Universe of Emotion" / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol

Before his so-called New York period, the Korean artist’s lyrical abstractions conjured classical East Asian motifs: moon jars, mountain ridges, plum blossoms, cranes and deer. However, within the New York art scene, such imagery was dismissed as derivative of Western Abstract Expressionism. The realization struck hard, pushing him to strip his art of figurative references and refine his visual language into pure elements: dots, lines and planes.

The paintings on view at Pace trace the evolution of his dot paintings, from early structural compositions of crosses and quadrants to later works pulsing with rhythmic constellations.

Up on the third floor, Gottlieb’s canvases present a world where intuitive shapes meet bold fields of color to visualize the dynamism of the unconscious.

His “Pictographs” of the 1940s employed all-over grids and invented symbols to give form to the unseen and the primal. In the subsequent decades, he turned to the “Imaginary Landscapes” series, with canvases divided into two planes: sky and earth, spirit and emotion.

Installation view of Adolph Gottlieb's canvases at Pace Gallery Seoul's "The Language of Abstraction, The Universe of Emotion" / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol

The “Burst” series, one of which inspired Kim at the São Paulo Biennale, distilled the structure of the “Imaginary Landscapes” into even simpler compositions: a floating orb colliding with a mass of explosive brushwork beneath. These paintings condensed opposing forces — sun and earth, order and chaos — into a single striking image.

By pairing Gottlieb’s works with Kim’s from the same era, the Seoul exhibition invites visitors to trace their parallel artistic trajectories.

“If the most striking element of Gottlieb’s ‘Burst’ series is its explosive, almost aggressive brushwork, then Kim’s style is more cosmic, lyrical and gentle. So while there are points of intersection between the two, the show also allows us to witness how differently each painter approached abstraction,” the gallery’s senior director Lee Young-joo said during Tuesday’s press preview.

“The Language of Abstraction, The Universe of Emotion” runs through Jan. 10, 2026.