Portrait of a Collection in Seoul

Curation : Caroline Bourgeois, Senior Curator of the Pinault Collection

SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation is delighted to present Portrait of a Collection : Selected Works from the Pinault Collection, an exhibition by the acclaimed Pinault Collection. Featuring more than 60 contemporary artworks, this groundbreaking showcase marks the first major presentation of the Pinault Collection to a Korean audience.

With the artists Lucas Arruda, Miriam Cahn, Xinyi Cheng, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Dominique Gonzalez-Foertser, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Hammons, Florian Krewer, Julie Mehretu, Antonio Oba, Anri Sala, Ser Serpas, Rudolf Stingel, Pol Taburet, Tatiana Trouvé, Luc Tuymans, Danh Vo, Anicka Yi, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

Inspired by the inaugural exhibition Ouverture presented by Pinault Collection at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris in 2021, Portrait of a Collection : Selected Works from the Pinault Collection encapsulates the essence of the Pinault Collection. The exhibition will span various media, including video installations, sculptures, drawings, and paintings, offering a comprehensive portrait of the collection’s diverse artistic expressions. 

A distinctive feature of the exhibition is the "companionship" approach that characterizes Pinault Collection. This long-term collaboration with artists facilitates the presentation of extensive bodies of works and detailed monographs, allowing visitors to explore the full spectrum of an artist’s oeuvre.

Another aspect of the Pinault Collection is its long-standing engagment in what might be called singular artist positions. Thus the exhibition at SONGEUN foundation will begin with artworks by Danh Vo, a Danish artist of Vietnamese origin whom Pinault Collection has presented several times in the museums in Venice and Paris. Located on the first floor of the exhibition space, the selection presented here allows the audience to grasp Danh Vo’s work, strongly marked by a fundamental and original form of displacement linked to his origins. 

Then, the journey continues with the “Welcome Room”  dedicated to African-American artist David Hammons, featuring the presentation of five emblematic works that span his career from the late 1960s to the present, allowing visitors to embrace all the questions that have been his, from works on paper from the late 1960s to his very recent pieces.

Facing Hammons’ works, Anri Sala - an artist of Albanian origin who mainly uses moving images and to whom Pinault Collection dedicated an exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce in 2022 - specifically recomposes for the Auditorium of SONGEUN the video 1395 Days Without Red a poignant work created during the Kosovo War. This work takes individuals into other realities and makes the audience feel both the madness of humanity and the beauty of hope through music that transcends time and space. 

The exhibition also features vibrating dialogues between Miriam Cahn and Peter Doig; Marlene Dumas and Luc Tuymans; Lucas Arruda and Anicka Yi; Julie Mehretu and Rudolf Stingel. 

The ultimate experience in the underground spaces of SONGEUN is the magical and unsettling installation Opera (QM. 15) by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, in which she embodies the mythical Maria Callas and plunges visitors into a moment of intense temporal disturbance. 

Main sponsor : SAINT LAURENT