C. Grimaldis is pleased to present False Relations, a two-person exhibition of work by Heejo Kim and Markus Baldegger. This survey display of paintings merges swift, gestural marks with thick, curvy figures to showcase unique and lyrical chromatic transitions.
Heejo Kim’s dreamy figurative paintings feel like fragments of a memory, each lived through amorphic, vibrantly molten bodies huddled together in moments of domesticity. Light illuminates, confronts, and sometimes hides portions of narrative, an expression which reveals much about the artist’s experience as a young woman in Seoul and her desire to find comfort and identity in space. Baldegger’s works respond with gesture. Delicate, yet powerful webbed abstractions play with perception as they balance coincidence and deliberate, impasto application by the artist. Baldegger approaches painting cognitively; the aim of his work is not narrative but is reduced rather to the possibilities of color itself.
Yet both Kim and Baldegger seem to tell a story about the familiar, with deep interest in composition, embracing the complexity of color, rhythm, and movement. The title of the show comes from the term defined in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1927) as “the analysis of harmony in two connections. It denotes the occurrence of a chromatic contradiction between two notes of the same cord … it also describes chromatic contradiction of similar character in two adjacent cords.” As painters, Kim and Baldegger hold many differences in identity and discipline, but within the context of False Relations, they share a melodic candor.
Heejo Kim (b. 1995, Seoul, South Korea) received an MFA from the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art. She has exhibited in the United States and Korea, including C. Grimaldis Gallery (Baltimore, MD), The Peale Museum (Baltimore, MD), Uprise Art Gallery (New York, NY), Art Miami (Miami, FL), and Art Palm Beach (Palm Beach, FL). Kim is currently based in Baltimore, MD.
Markus Baldegger (b. 1947, Altstätten, Switzerland) began painting in the 1980s after attending Art School Cologne (Germany) and since has had an extensive career in Europe with museum exhibitions at the Siegerland Museum (Siegen, Germany), the Leonhardi Museum (Dresden, Germany), and the Daniel-Pöppelmann Museum (Herford, Germany). He is collected by the Kunstmuseum Aarau (Switzerland), Kunstmuseum Chur (Switzerland), and Siegerland Museum Siegen (Germany). Baldegger is now based in Belgium and Germany.
False Relations will be on view at C. Grimaldis Gallery from May 16 through June 22, 2024. A reception will take place on Thursday, May 16th from 5:00 to 7:00 PM. Hours for C. Grimaldis Gallery, which is free and open to the public, are Wednesday through Saturday, 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM.
