Venue: Centre Pompidou, Level 5

Considered a major artist in South Korea, where a museum has been devoted to him since 2007, the painter and sculptor Lee Ung-no (Seoul, 1904 – Paris, 1989) remains little known in his adoptive country, France. The Musée National d'Art Moderne can now boast of a representative selection of his work, thanks to his wife and son’s generous donation of fourteen paintings and three sculptures. Trained in Korea and Japan in both ink-painting and Western painting, Lee Ung-no first showed in the West in New York in 1957. He began his European career in Germany before settling in France in 1960. On arriving in Paris, Lee Ung-no began to show at Studio Paul Facchetti and abandoned the poetic landscapes typical of his work until then. His turn to a radical abstraction marked by a “matterist” language reflected his speedy assimilation of Parisian Art Informel. In 1963 he began to incorporate abstract ideograms in his collages.

Events took a dramatic turn in 1967, when he was arrested for espionage in Seoul and sentenced to life imprisonment. He would be released two years later, thanks to the activities of a defence committee that included many artists. Back in France, his compositions sometimes featured slogans reacting to the political situation in the country of his birth, where he remained persona non grata until 1988. Deeply affected by the bloody repression of the Gwangju Uprising of 1980, Lee Ung-no embarked on his “Crowds” series, returning to the ink painting he had never entirely abandoned to compose a vibrant appeal for popular freedom.

Curator

Mnam/Cci, Bernard Blistène

 

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