Perrotin Inaugurates a Second Space in Seoul with Emma Webster's First Solo Exhibition at The Gallery

Perrotin is delighted to announce the inauguration of a second gallery in Seoul. Gangnam's Perrotin Dosan Park will open on August 27, 2022 with an exhibition by British-American artist Emma Webster, marking the artist's debut with Perrotin.

Perrotin Dosan Park is located in the centre of Seoul's luxury retail area between Dosan Park and Horim Art Center, near the flagships of major worldwide brands such as Maison Hermès Dosan Park across the street and Maison Louis Vuitton Seoul, as well as two large Korean auction houses.

KIAS (Kentaro Ishida Architects Studio), in partnership with Yoki Design and Kenny Ho, developed the two-story structure with around 190 square metres (2,060 square feet) of display space.

Perrotin Dosan Park is the twelfth site of the gallery in seven cities: Paris, Hong Kong, New York, Seoul, Tokyo, and Dubai.

In 2016, Perrotin, one of the first foreign galleries to open an exhibition space in Seoul, opened a branch in the ancient cultural district of Samcheong-dong. The gallery's expansion in the capital of South Korea intends to strategically widen its portfolio and enhance its relationships to the art community by boosting its programming at exhibition spaces in both the northern and southern areas of Seoul.

The opening of Perrotin Dosan Park will coincide with the inaugural Frieze Seoul (2–5) and the 21st Kiaf Seoul (September 2–5). (September 2–6). The booth at Frieze is devoted to a solo exhibition by New York-based artist Tavares Strachan, making his Asian debut, while the booth at Kiaf will include new works by a variety of the gallery's programme artists.

Beginning on August 5 at the original space at Perrotin Samcheong-dong, Bay Area artist Barry McGee's first solo exhibition in South Korea will be on display until September 8, 2022.

The debut exhibition at Perrotin Dosan Park will be a solo show by Emma Webster, a Los Angeles-based artist born in Encinitas, California in 1989. Webster's debut with Perrotin and in Asia is exemplified by Illuminarium, a work created specifically for Dosan Park. After previous solo exhibits at Carl Kostyál (London), Alexander Berggruen (New York), and Stems Gallery (Brussels), the artist joins the gallery in 2021.

Landscape paintings by Emma Webster transport visitors to fantastic realms. Her realistic and hallucinogenic depictions of space combine spatial expectations with baffling imagination. The paintings are the result of a hybrid sketching-sculpting method in screen space. Webster creates natural views that revel in artifice, drama, and distortion by constructing sceneries in virtual reality, which she then illuminates with theatrical lighting.

Webster says of her VR models, "Working from inside the still life is more analogous to how we navigate the world. "There is no 'outside'." Illuminarium manipulates our conceptions of the virtual. On canvas, Webster's fluid translation of 2D into 3D and vice versa cheekily implies a new kind of collage. This process of kneading between media, consisting of fleshing out and then flattening, clarifying and then obscuring, refines the illusory worlds. The New Yorker lauded her "imaginative approach to the centuries-old genre of landscape," and her ventures embody an unique tension as they combine cutting-edge technology with a time-honored painting technique.

Emma Webster (1989-born) is a graduate of Stanford University (Bachelor of Arts, 2011) and Yale University (Master of Fine Arts in Painting, 2018). Webster released Lonescape: Green, Painting, & Mourning Reality in 2021, a collection of her thoughts on landscape and image-making in an increasingly digital world, among other topics.