http://www.atmgallery.com/artist/view/1201

Bill Brady ~ ATM gallery is please to present New Work, a solo exhibition of Min Kim.

Min Kim’s disparate installation pieces are a result of an attempt to rationalize and comprehend the allusive bindings that sustain our intricately woven existence. Kim’s constant inquiry into the contingencies of identity, home and the structure of our inner and outer world functions as means to construct a place that slips between the margins of the tangible and fleeting spaces.

The intuitive processes of using emblematic imagery and the implications of dreams, as well as an exploration of the intermediary attributes of shamanistic beliefs filtered through everyday experiences, yield grounds for the artist to steer, unravel and exorcize the complex meaning and motivations of our interiority.

The eight installation pieces in the exhibition combine the techniques associated with drawing, painting, collage and sculpture. The idiosyncrasies of each piece activate the contextual and spatial relationships between other works in the group.

Use of the often understated or fragile materials carry the weight of vulnerability and uncertainty of our perception. This parallels Kim’s precarious construction of the pieces, her use of variably paired materials, and their specific arrangements in the gallery. Detailed manipulation of the materials beckons the viewer to participate in visually manifested psychological space.

Kim’s net of investigation is cast wide to the ambiguity of the human experience for observation and reflection; a process that translates and transforms the findings into a space of elasticity.

Min Kim was born in 1975 in Seoul, Korea and now lives and works in New York. She earned BFA from Maryland Institute, College of Art. She had solo exhibitions in Torch gallery, Amsterdam; Galleria Glance,Turin; Bell Weather Gallery, NY and Marc Selwyn gallery, LA. She also has participated in group exhibitions in P.S.1 New York; Seoul Arts Center, Seoul; Martini Arte Internazionale, Turin.

Peter, who you might already know from his debut show at ATM, Blame it on the Dog and Andrew an amazing sculptor and image maker bring together works which speak about the breaking down between high and low art forms and their meanings. One example of an equalizer is the Internet and how anyone can be a star overnight on u-tube. This looks like it's going to be interesting!
The opening will be the October 22 from 6-8 pm and will run through October 31. So it's a short one!

ARTnews MAGAZINE
December 2009
Virginia Martinsen’s first solo exhibition was an ambitious, highly intellectual revisiting of Abstract Expressionism. The show’s title “A Face on Mars,” alluded to the photograph brought back from the Viking 1 spacecraft in 1976, which shoes what appears to be a human face on the planet’s surface. The illusion underscores the human propensity to project the familiar onto the unknown.
The nine paintings here, most of them from this year, were based on Martinsen’s distinctive methodology. She pours paint, varnish, dry pigment, and alkyd onto the rimed surface of her canvas and allows them to flow, gather, clump, and solidify, creating the effect of an aerial survey and leaving no trace of the human hand.
The Accidental By-Product (2009), for example, is a textured composition of roiling black cut through layers of gray opening into a glowing light-filled space. Another large piece, The Quandary of Pascal’s Wager (2009), featuring ochre shading that spreads into yellow on gray planes with white stains flowing down the edges, purports to address in physical terms the philosopher’s gamble, whereby we should live life as if God exists.
Martinsen’s dexterous paintings here ranged in content, as their titles indicate, from the descriptive, Reclining Female Nude (2009), to the theological, A Refutation of the Argument from Beauty (2008), to a Bertrand Russell parable in The Search for the Celestial Teapot (2009), to the Pacific islanders’ cargo cults with Awaiting the Arrival of John Frum (2009), and pop extraterrestrial phenomena with Second Sighting of the Ilkley Moor Alien (2009).
Martinsen has deconstructed the concept of abstraction with these controlled paintings that engage viewers visually, intellectually, and emotionally.
-Charles Ruas

The Village Voice
September 2009
Abstract expressionism is now so embedded in our culture—accepted as a kind of brand name—that new work too often reflects out complacency with the style; the visions are bland, sloppy, or ill-conceived, aspiring to little more than unfocused doodling (a la early Cy Twombly) or, worse, inoffensive mélanges of color that corporations buy for their lobbies.
So when a young newcomer shows up, in her first solo show, with a bold approach, mature ideas, and a tendency for restraint, it’s almost startling. Such is the case with 28-year-old Virginia Martinsen, who brings unhurried vigor and a somber palette to her particular method of action painting. Inspired by her visits to the castle of Austrian wild-man Hermann Nitsch (performer/paint thrower/blood spatterer), Martinsen pours a solution of oils, vanish, and dry pigment onto a canvas lying flat and with only a little guidance, lets the puddles flow. It may sound simple, but Martinsen brings evident seriousness to whatever decisions she makes (particularly about when to stop). The work is elegant and haunting, a combination of brooding darkness, watercolor-like delicacy, and powerful movement. In a smaller painting, The Accidental By-Product (her term, actually, for all of her work), a pale area tries to resist an encroaching sea of black, reaching out, on one side with only the thinnest of pathetic tendrils. On several canvases, inky floods coalesce around yellowish oval sacs, suggestive of a central, organizing force. Many of Martinsen’s titles, in fact, refer to philosophic concepts of God, but even without them her works bear a bracing spiritual substance.
- Robert Shuster

New work by
Sascha Braunig
Jesse Farber
Yui Kugimiya
Jonathan Roth
Leigh Ruple
Matthew Savitsky

Please join us for the first exhibition in our new space.

May 15 - June 28, 2008

Closing party | Thursday June 26, 2008 6-9pm

Huma Bhabha, Tomoo Gokita, Min Kim

Mikiya Matsuda
Peter Halasz
Derek Mainella