Byron Kim
b. 1961, La Jolla, CA
Belly Painting (Blue/Green), 1994
Encaustic on linen on panel
Courtesy the artist

Byron Kim explores how issues of race, body, and identity intersect with the history of abstract paintings in the postwar United States. His work often straddles high abstraction and figurative representation, challenging conventional notions of both. Synecdoche, a notable example, confounds chromaticity with corporeality, destabilizing the prevailing binaries constructed in the discourse of painting.

Belly Painting consists of an excess of latex paint that bulges and stretches beyond the canvas, evoking the appearance of a distended or pregnant belly. This work furthers Kim’s practice of mobilizing painting's materiality to signify social and corporeal concepts, reclaiming the abstract sublime from the tradition of so-called pure painting for a socio-critical approach to figuration.