NAM KIM

Nam Kim
Everything touches
31 October – 12 December 2026

With Everything touches, Galerie Robert Grunenberg presents Nam Kim’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and her first in its new space on Kantstraße. Since her first exhibition, Snakes have legs, in 2024, the artist, born in the United States in 1991 and raised in South Korea, has moved to Berlin. The new paintings, all created here, unfold across the gallery as a panoramic landscape. Bodies, plants, ornamental structures and abstract fields of colour extend across individual canvases, coming together to form an expansive garden.

Kim’s paintings begin with gestural abstraction. Luminous, expressive fields of colour form the foundation of each composition. Further layers are then applied, from which human forms gradually emerge. The figures are not placed onto a pre-existing background but worked out of the painterly ground itself. Shadows and contours along their edges give them an almost sculptural presence, while the original colours remain visible within their bodies. Like apparitions, they emerge from abstraction without ever fully detaching themselves from it. Surface and depth, figure and ground remain in constant movement in relation to one another.

The bodies themselves similarly resist clear definition. They are muscular yet weightless, often nude and androgynous, neither distinctly male nor female. Hair seems to be caught by an invisible breeze, limbs suspended in the midst of movement. Figures lean against one another, carry and touch each other, dance, recline or rest among plants. Their nudity suggests communal intimacy rather than erotic display. Some figures meet our gaze, while others ignore it. Closeness and distance exist simultaneously.

In the new works, this permeability increasingly extends into the landscape. Bodies merge with leaves, patterns and fields of colour, as though becoming part of the vegetation or temporarily concealing themselves within it. Identity appears not as a fixed and clearly delineated form but as something in motion. Bodies, colour and nature flow into one another without entirely surrendering their autonomy. Across the panoramic structure of the exhibition, what emerges is less a sequence of individual scenes than a shared world.

The garden has long been a central pictorial space in Kim’s work. It brings together Western ideas of paradise and the hortus conclusus with Korean traditions in which nature can function as spiritual terrain. Yet Kim’s gardens are not untouched places of longing. They are staged utopias in which otherness, coexistence and estrangement can exist alongside one another. Her figures linger not in purposeful action but in states between rest and movement, closeness and isolation, dreaming and wakefulness.

In Everything touches, this counter-space takes on a new urgency. Political and social developments in South Korea occupied Kim intensely, particularly throughout 2025. The paradisiacal landscapes of the new paintings also emerge against this background. They can be read as a counter-image to a present experienced as conflicted, without ever entirely turning away from it. Paradise does not become an escape, nor a nostalgic return to an imagined authentic Korean culture. It remains an artificial, hybrid and deliberately contradictory place.