Byron Kim

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title: "Byron Kim" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["american-contemporary-painters", "20th-century-american-painters", "american-male-painters", "21st-century-american-painters", "21st-century-american-male-artists", "1961-births", "living-people", "people-from-la-jolla,-san-diego", "20th-century-american-male-artists", "american-artists-of-korean-descent"] description: "American painter (born 1961)" topic_path: "geography/united-states" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byron_Kim" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary American painter (born 1961) ::

Byron Kim (born in 1961 in La Jolla, California) is an American contemporary artist. He is Korean American, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. In the early 1990s he produced minimalist paintings exploring racial identity. He graduated from Yale University in 1983 where he was a member of Manuscript Society.

Works

Kim's work in the early 1990s consisted of monochrome canvases depicting the skin tones of friends and family. He gained early recognition for Synecdoche, his contribution to the 1993 Whitney Biennial, which embodied the aesthetic and political aspirations of the art in that year's exhibition. Synecdoche (1991–1992) is a grid of 400 small, monochromatic paintings. Each panel recreates the skin color of an individual who sat for Kim while he painted their portrait.

These monochrome canvases were followed by two or three-zoned canvases that color-sampled objects, sites or people. 46 Halsey Drive Wallingford CT (1995) records his family members' various recollections of the color of a home Kim lived in as a child. Other works employ a more naturalistic approach to represent details such as the palms of the artist's hands, or the whorls in his children's hair.

Kim also paints landscapes

His work may be found in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

References

References

1. Vogel, Maria. (2021-03-19). "Artist Byron Kim’s Deceptively Modest Meditations on Identity Pose Important Questions—Here Are 3 Facts to Know About His Work".
2. Berwick, Carly. (2011-04-23). "Stranger in America".
3. [[Carey Lovelace]], [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_10_89/ai_79276175 ''Byron Kim at Max Protetch - Brief Article'', ''Art in America'', October 2001.]
4. Michael Kelly in Salim Kemal, Ivan Gaskell, ''Politics and Aesthetics in the Arts'', Cambridge University Press, 2000, p249. {{ISBN. 0-521-45418-2
5. Although the works, at first glance, resemble minimalist paintings of the 1960s the racial and political dimensions became apparent after reading in the exhibition catalogue how the works came about.Michael Kelly in Salim Kemal, Ivan Gaskell, ''Politics and Aesthetics in the Arts'', Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp249-250. {{ISBN. 0-521-45418-2
6. Kim collaborated with artist [[Glenn Ligon]] on ''Black & White'' (1993), part of a series critiquing the 'prejudices' of art materials, specifically the hues of 'Flesh'-colored tubes of paint.[[Erika Doss]], ''Twentieth-Century American Art'', Oxford University Press, 2002, p237. {{ISBN. 0-19-284239-0
7. "Byron Kim".

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