All Numbers End; a duo exhibition with Isabelle Borges & Yisu Kim
ISABELLE BORGES (born in 1966 in Salvador, Brazil, lives and works in Berlin and Rotterdam)
“One day my eyes got caught by a ‘drawing’ – created by the broken branches of water plants and reed standing in the middle of a lake (…) – Isabelle Borges
In her primarily abstract works, Isabelle Borges explores patterns and structures she encounters in the visible world. In urban surroundings as well as in her long walks in nature. Her primary focus is on the geometry of the spaces between things and the resulting spatial dynamics.
Influenced by Brazilian modern architecture and Bauhaus, Isabelle Borges creates large-scale (wall-) drawings that, with their colored lines, conceive open geometric pictorial spaces.
Spatial illusion and the flatness of shapes are in constant interplay in her oeuvre. The forms she creates are not constructions consisting of purely pictorial elements. Seemingly random structures often inspire Borges she chances upon in the urban environment, in nature, or in the mass media. The range of her work is broad, both in its aesthetic and content, encompassing historical allusions, perceptual experiments, discursive interrogations, and purely subjective approaches.
Based on the moving strategy of manifold foldings, reflections, and rotations of the internal; forms, the artist creates ‘moving surfaces’ that provide the framework for a condensed new pictorial space. In the process, her ‘Boxes’ are actual three-dimensional objects layered from different colored cardboard, whose luminous colors and mirrored surfaces open up an invisible space to the viewer. The reference to the Neo-Concretists from Brazil cannot be overlooked, nor to the representatives of the European and New York Schools of the 1950s and 1960s. And comparable to her role models, Borges uses the playful tension between construction and dynamics for poetic narratives and opens a place for individual moods and fantasies for the viewer.
Isabelle Borges studied Fine Arts at the Art Academies in Rio de Janeiro and Düsseldorf following. She has had numerous solo exhibitions in Europe and Brazil, including the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture MUBE, São Paulo (2013) and the Museum of the Republic, Rio de Janeiro (2000). As part of the 14th International Curitiba Biennial, a large hall at the Museum Oscar Niemeyer, Curitiba (2019/2020) was dedicated to her. Borges works are represented in numerous institutional and private collections in Brazil and all over Europe.
Yisu Kim (Korea, 1974) lives and works in Seoul.
Yisu Kim tries to express a landscape of a dim Inframince floating over the surface of a lake amid the fog. The concept of such Inframince supports her sentiment.
The term ‘infra mince,’ introduced by Marcel Duchamp, means ‘of being extremely thin and tiny.’ This idea can be understood as a thing that has no proper identity or can be explained as the betweenness of an unrecognizable area and its edges. This is a complicated, unstable conception. Kim’s landscapes exist on a permanent boundary, inaccessible like the horizon. Kim recalls the boundary as a landscape of Inframince.
Kim’s works have been shown worldwide in galleries and other art institutions, the most recent in the Hendrick Hamel Museum in Gorinchem, the Netherlands. Her work is to be found in private and public collections.
Kim holds an M.F.A. from the Pratt Institute of Art & Design (U.S.A.) and a B.F.A. and M.F.A. from Sungshin Women’s University (S-Korea). She lives and works in Seoul, S-Korea.