Extended! Now on view through Sunday, September 30th

Ground Floor Gallery is pleased to conclude our 5th anniversary exhibition, ” . . .  in 5 Acts,” with “Sfumato,” mid-career artist Mie Yim’s first solo show in 10 years!

We are proud to have the privilege of showcasing the artist’s recent abstract paintings and drawings as the summer draws to a close and an exciting fall season looms ahead.

Based in Sunset Park, Yim was featured in the gallery’s 2016 group exhibition, “Assembly Desired.”  For her solo effort, she’ll be presenting larger-scale, sumptuous paintings created between 2017 – 2018.

The artist explains her title, “Sfumato,” in this letter addressed to Leonardo Da Vinci – the brilliant mind who originally created this visual device – below.

See the exhibition and available works HERE.

Installation Photos: Claudia Mandlik

Dear Mr. Da Vinci,

I wanted to thank you from the bottom of my heart for letting me use the term, “Sfumato” for my painting show.

Yes you are the master at blending colors and shapes to the softest edges, where the lines disappear.  I’m not sure if you invented the technique, but you certainly perfected it.  I love the meaning of the word, “to evaporate like smoke”.

Poof!  There goes your Mona Lisa.

You see, when I think about my childhood, I think of softness.  It’s tactile, dreamy and lilac colors.  Or is it?  Maybe it was tears, anxiety and abandonment.  I’m not sure, I mistrust my memories.  When I was twelve years old, I left my home to join my mother in a new place called Hawaii.  It was beautiful.  Actually, it was terrible.  The world appeared to be unstable.  Poof.

Later on as a young adult, I went to your country to study art for a year.

I saw a lot of paintings, yours of course and tons of other artists that were your peers and others who followed in your foot steps.   

I was so inspired. 

I started out making figurative paintings.  There were made up characters like bears and bunnies in fantasy narrative situations.  I guess harking back to my early years.  The story telling is great, but there’s this whole other thing called abstraction that you missed out on that’s pretty awesome.  So I had to try that too.  I literally started to break down the images.

For this show at Ground Floor Gallery, I chose recent paintings.  Some veer toward  abstraction, almost minimalist, others are figurative and a bit surrealist. 

The lines of categorization are blurred and open ended, as well as the images are physically hazy and fuzzy, hence the title.

I construct the paintings out of horizontal and vertical lines like scaffoldings or skeletons. 

I erase, scuff, glaze, I lay on paint thick and thin. 

I use sugary saturated colors and shapes that are derived from anthropomorphic parts, they could conjure up bunny ears, doe eyes.(back to childhood, see?)  They have transpired into abstract depictions, using intuitive sources and drawing on influences that occurred as I evolved in the Western world as an artist.

You could say the paintings are kind of metaphysical portraits of beings imbuing pathos and existential anxiety with a squeeze of pugnacious hilarity.

I think about going underneath the banal gaze and evocative puffs of teddy bears to build forms that are gestural and spatial.

If you were alive today, so many of your ideas would be developed into apps. 

You’d be rich and famous.

I wish you could see my show, I’d love to hear your thoughts. 

Ciao for now.

Yours truly,

Mie