Mie Yim

Belladonna

March 31 - May 6, 2023

Olympia is pleased to present Belladonna, Mie Yim’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition is organized around Yim’s extensive engagement with fibrous pastel drawings and large scale paintings.

Yim creates colorfields of a playfully profane sexuality; characterized by grotesque anthropomorphism and anatomical, sometimes pornographic, contours. The selection of fifteen drawings and two large-scale paintings speak to the nuances of power and vulnerability. What often appears edible may in fact bite.

The center height of the framed shizen paper works stands as a psychological horizon line, pushing the viewer towards the enigmatic fluidity of the human mind, form, and biography. Yim highlights the aura of existentialism, erasing the lines between fact and fiction to interpret her own personal trajectory within self-derived iconoclastic languages. Yim’s practice of drawing and painting is constant. By treating each surface with equal significance, the two formats nourish and replenish the other. The site-specific mural extends this responsive material cognisance.

The artist’s first exhibition took place in January 2021, only two months after Olympia opened its doors as a permanent resident in the Lower East Side. That exhibition, Psychotropic Dance, was Yim’s debut of a series of “quarantine drawings” – bold, 11 x 8 inch pastel drawings on handmade paper that the artist created at home when she lost access to her studio at the height of the pandemic. The material dialogue between the two mediums has become fundamental to Yim’s practice. We are thrilled to continue our dual growth, side by side.

Belladonna is part of a conversation with Mie Yim’s concurrent solo exhibition, Nightshade, which will be on display from April 15 to May 23 at Simone Subal Gallery. The names of the exhibitions are after highly toxic plants with associations that draw on deeper meaning for the galleries. As plants known for their deadly berries and flowers, not only do they refer to themes of fatal beauty explored in Yim’s work, but the belladonna is sometimes known as deadly nightshade, with the latter being the umbrella term for the family of plants that the belladonna belongs to. We use this relationship to visualize the family of roots growing in the Lower East Side, and the indelible flowering and celebration of Mie Yim’s practice between our two galleries.

Mie Yim was born in South Korea and lives and works in New York. Selected solo exhibitions include: ScottMillerProjects, Birmingham, AL (2022); Brattleboro Art Museum, Brattleboro, VT (2022); Galeria Mascota, CDMX, Mexico (2022); Villa Magdalena, San Sebastian, Spain (2021); Olympia, New York, NY (2021); the Durst Foundation, New York, NY (2019); Ground Floor Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2018); Michael Steinberg Fine Art, New York, NY (2009); Lehmann Maupin, New York, NY (2004); Galerie in Arco, Torino, Italy (2004). Selected group exhibitions include: Canada Gallery, New York NY (2022); Samuele Visentin, London, UK (2022); Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta, GA (2022, 2020, 2017); Patrick Parrish Gallery, New York, NY (2021); and Untitled Art Fair, Miami, FL (2021).
Yim has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships including Yaddo Artist Residency, Saratoga Springs, NY (2022); Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (2020); the Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Grant (2018); the New York Foundation of the Arts Painting Fellowship (2021, 2015); and the Bronx Museum AIM Fellowship (1991). Mie Yim’s work is in the public collection at Nelsons Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO.