Summer-Long Show of Lee Ufan Sculptures in the Rijksmuseum Gardens

All nine exhibits are part of Lee’s Relatum series, which he has been working on continuously since the 1970s. The stone and metal sculptures will engage in a visual dialogue with the surrounding nature and the museum architecture.

Seven sculptures will be displayed in the gardens that surround the Rijksmuseum, and two will be installed at special locations inside the museum. These minimalist works are outcomes of Lee Ufan’s explorations into what he calls ‘the Art of Encounter'. They are invitations to contemplate, to find a moment of quiet and calm on the museum square.

Lee has recreated several of his key works especially for this Rijksmuseum exhibition, which juxtaposes recent and older works in the new context of the gardens. The sculptures invite reflection and stillness in a rapidly changing world.Korean artist Lee Ufan (b. 1936) works in Japan and France. As well as being a sculptor, he is a painter, poet and philosopher. Work by Lee Ufan is held in the collections of renowned museums all over the world, including Benesse Art Site Naoshima, Japan; MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Tate, London; and the Kröller-Müller Museum, the Netherlands.

Relatum - The Narrow Road, 2021. Photo: Courtesy Studio Lee Ufan/Claire Dorn

Lee is one of the founders of the Japanese avant-garde art movement Mono-ha (‘School of Things’), whose exponents use raw materials and components such as stone, iron and water to explore the relationship between objects and space. Lee was also a central figure in the South Korean art movement Dansaekhwa, which saw artists experimenting with abstraction and materiality primarily through monochrome painting. Distinctive features of these two movements and Lee Ufan’s oeuvre as a whole include minimalism, abstraction and a focus on the material, with a central role for dialogue between the viewer, the surroundings and the sometimes contrasting materials.

Lee Ufan in the Rijksmuseum Gardens is the 11th exhibition in the public gardens of the Rijksmuseum. Previous editions were devoted to the work of Henry Moore (2013), Alexander Calder (2014), Joan Miró (2015), Giuseppe Penone (2016), Jean Dubuffet (2017), Eduardo Chillida (2018), Louise Bourgeois (2019), Ellsworth Kelly (2021), Barbara Hepworth (2022) and Richard Long (2023).

Main Image :Lee Ufan. Photo: Rijksmuseum/Kelly Schenk