This catalogue accompanies the first comprehensive retrospective of the Korean painter and sculptor Lee Ufan in Germany. This monograph presents ample installation shots, as well as thorough scholarship on Ufan’s immense impact on the postwar art movements of Japan and Korea; how the artist’s philosophical writings shaped the collective Mono-ha (School of Things); and how his abstract paintings of the mid-1970s are emblematic of the Korean collective Dansaekhwa.

The exhibition gathers around 50 works from the past five decades, featuring an extraordinary highlight. Rembrandt’s famous Self-Portrait with Velvet Beret (1634) from the Berlin Gemäldegalerie is shown for the first time at Hamburger Bahnhof alongside Lee’s expansive installation Relatum – The Mirror Road (2016–23). Ufan, who repeatedly refers to European roots in his corpus of works, enters into a multilayered dialogue with the Old Master.

Author: Lee Ufran
Paperback
268 page
24.1 x 17.1cm