Everything touches

Courtesy Robert Grunenberg

With Everything touches, Galerie Robert Grunenberg presents Nam Kim’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and her first in its new space on Kantstraße. Since her first exhibition, Snakes have legs, in 2024, the artist, born in the United States in 1991 and raised in South Korea, has moved to Berlin. The new paintings, all created here, unfold across the gallery as a panoramic landscape. Bodies, plants, ornamental structures and abstract fields of colour extend across individual canvases, coming together to form an expansive garden.

Kim’s paintings begin with gestural abstraction. Luminous, expressive fields of colour form the foundation of each composition. Further layers are then applied, from which human forms gradually emerge. The figures are not placed onto a pre-existing background but worked out of the painterly ground itself. Shadows and contours along their edges give them an almost sculptural presence, while the original colours remain visible within their bodies. Like apparitions, they emerge from abstraction without ever fully detaching themselves from it. Surface and depth, figure and ground remain in constant movement in relation to one another.

The bodies themselves similarly resist clear definition. They are muscular yet weightless, often nude and androgynous, neither distinctly male nor female. Hair seems to be caught by an invisible breeze, limbs suspended in the midst of movement. Figures lean against one another, carry and touch each other, dance, recline or rest among plants. Their nudity suggests communal intimacy rather than erotic display. Some figures meet our gaze, while others ignore it. Closeness and distance exist simultaneously.

In the new works, this permeability increasingly extends into the landscape. Bodies merge with leaves, patterns and fields of colour, as though becoming part of the vegetation or temporarily concealing themselves within it. Identity appears not as a fixed and clearly delineated form but as something in motion. Bodies, colour and nature flow into one another without entirely surrendering their autonomy. Across the panoramic structure of the exhibition, what emerges is less a sequence of individual scenes than a shared world.