“Dear Folks“ Installation view at Museum Hanmi Samcheong ©Museum HanmiMuseum Hanmi Samcheong will present Dear Folks, an exhibition by contemporary photography master William Klein (1926-2022), from May 24 to September 17, 2023, as this exhibition of overseas artists. This exhibition will be the first retrospective in Korea and the first in the world since the artist’s passing in 2022.
The artist, who created a new wave of visual art in the 20th century, will present more than 130 major works and 40 documents from his career, including photography but also painting, design, video, and publications, in eight sections. The first is a selection of early geometric abstract paintings and photograms of light painted by Klein as a young man in Paris in the 1950s.
Subsequent sections illustrate the artist’s crossing of genre boundaries, including photographs taken outdoors, straight photographs that document the raw reality of city streets, 1960s lettrism-inspired paintings that emphasize the sound effects of letters clustered together rather than the meaning of words, fashion photography taken on the street, documentary films, as well as his ‘painted contact’ prints from the 1990s will be presented together.
Working in painting, photography, graphic design, and filmmaking, William Klein is an artist at the forefront of contemporary video aesthetics. His interdisciplinary work challenged conventions, taboos, and limitations, subverting the conventions and aesthetics of 20th-century visual art in original and unconventional ways.
Nevertheless, the public has known him only in a specific genre or work, and this exhibition aims to showcase the artist’s versatility by bringing together works spanning more than 50 years of artistic activity. The various works, which were born in different areas, were born from the originality and inspiration of a single person, and appear in a single trajectory, emphasizing the achievements that point to the wide range of skills of a talented artist.
