Lee Ufan

Hamburger Bahnhof presents the first comprehensive exhibition of the painter and sculptor Lee Ufan in Germany. Lee is one of the most important representatives of the Mono-ha school in Japan and the Dansaekhwa movement in Korea, which developed parallel to other minimalist art movements. The exhibition comprises about 50 works from five decades of his creative work. A special highlight is the first-time presentation of Rembrandt's famous painting "Self-Portrait with Velvet Barret" (1634) from the Berlin Gemäldegalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, which enters into dialogue with Lee's expansive installation "Relatum - The Mirror Road" (2016/2023).

Through Lee's art, visitors gain an insight into the formative art movements of Japan and Korea in the 1970s and a new perspective on an icon of Western European art. The exhibition also offers an overview of the work of the Korean artist Lee Ufan, almost 50 years after his first participation in an exhibition at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. Lee's philosophical writings influenced the artist collective Mono-ha, which was active in Tokyo from 1968 to 1975 and is one of the most influential styles of post-war art in Japan. In their sculptures and installations, the artists combined natural materials such as stones, branches or earth with industrial materials such as steel or glass in order to understand art as a reordering of things. This concept is also evident in Lee's sculpture series "Relatum" (from 1968). In the Dansaekhwa movement, Korean artists from the mid-1970s onwards were primarily concerned with abstraction and materiality in monochrome painting. Examples of this are paintings from Lee's series "From Point" (from 1973) and "From Line" (from 1978). In addition, the sculpture "Relatum" (1977) from the collection of the National Gallery will be shown in the museum's garden, the first time it has been on display in Berlin since 1985.