BYRON KIM Synecdoche, 1991-1992 Wax and oil on panel 100 panels 8 x 10 in. each (JCG10305) Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. © Byron Kim 2019. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York.
(New York, NY – December 2, 2019) – The Estate of Robert De Niro, Sr. is delighted to announce that Byron Kim is the 2019 recipient of the esteemed Robert De Niro, Sr. Prize. Established in 2011 by Robert De Niro, Jr. in honor of his late father, the accomplished painter Robert De Niro, Sr., the prize recognizes a mid-career American artist for their significant and innovative contributions to the field of painting. Nominated each year by a distinguished selection committee, Byron Kim is the eighth recipient of the $25,000 merit-based prize, administered by the Tribeca Film Institute (TFI) of which Robert De Niro, Jr. is a co-founder.
This year’s selection committee included Carmen Hermo, Associate Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum; Norman Kleeblatt, former Chief Curator of The Jewish Museum and now an independent curator and critic; and William S. Smith, Editor of Art in America.
Of Kim’s work, Smith remarked, “Byron Kim demonstrates how a minimalist visual vocabulary can be maximally affecting. His paintings reflect his careful attention to the subtleties of color, surface, and light while simultaneously demonstrating the medium’s ability to facilitate everything from broad social engagement to deeply personal rumination.”
“Byron Kim’s practice stands out for its conceptual rigor and its poetic engagement with and reflection of everyday life,” Carmen Hermo offered. “He explores issues of time, identity, and diaristic musings using a minimalist approach to unexpectedly emotional ends.”
Adding to the comments of his fellow jurors, Norman Kleeblatt states that, “To describe Byron Kim’s paintings it seems inevitable to reach for hybrid, dialectical, ambiguous, and/or contradictory explications. His paintings are at once abstract and representational, painterly and conceptual. While the quality of his paint is often sensual, the structure is usually informed by indexical reasoning. A sense of expressive detachment fuses with archival zeal, yet a superimposed personal scripted narrative overrides the objective. Kim is heir to the contrasting, perceptual sublimes of both John Constable and Ad Reinhardt.”
Robert De Niro remarks that, “Byron Kim’s dedication to his art and his deep commitment to teaching resonates with my father’s own commitment. I am therefore especially pleased with the selection committee’s choice this year as it truly honors my father’s memory.”
BYRON KIM Sunday Painting 9/11/16, 2016 Acrylic and pencil on canvas mounted on panel 14 x 14 in. 35.6 x 35.6 cm (JCG9575) © Byron Kim 2019. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York.
Byron Kim, born in 1961, is a Senior Critic at Yale University. He received a BA from Yale University in 1983 and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1986. His work sits at the threshold between abstraction and representation, between conceptualism and pure painting. In his richly hued, minimalist works, Kim seeks to push the edges of what we understand as abstract painting by using the medium to develop an idea that typically gets worked out over the course of an ongoing series. Kim’s paintings may appear to be pure abstractions, but upon investigation, they reveal a charged space that often connects to the artist’s personal experiences in relation to larger cultural forces. Recent solo exhibitions include Byron Kim: The Sunday Paintings, Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Ohio (2019); Pond Lily Over Mushroom Cloud: Byron Kim Adapts the Black on Black Cosmology of Maria Martinez, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, California (2016); and a mid-career survey, Threshold, Berkeley Art Museum, California, which traveled to the Samsung Museum of Modern Art, Seoul, South Korea and five other locations in the United States (2006–7). His artwork may be found in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; and Tate Modern, London, UK.