Bohie | Campanini | Fattal

Tre mostre: Kim Bohie | Pierpaolo Campanini | Simone Fattal.

Comunicato stampa

kaufmann repetto is glad to announce Towards, Bohie Kim’s first Italian solo exhibition, opening on April 15th in Milan. One of Korea’s most esteemed landscape painters, her vividly chromatic compositions synthesize a breadth of influences, merging Oriental and Western traditions. At the core of Kim’s radiant paintings are the exuberant forms of the natural world, infused with evocative visual and spiritual qualities.

Kim was initially trained in East Asian painting, employing ink-wash techniques on hanji, the traditional Korean mulberry paper. Gradually she started to incorporate also Western mediums such as canvas and acrylics, developing a hybrid style for her depictions of landscapes, still-lifes and human figures. After earning both her BFA and MFA from Ewha Womans University, she served as a professor in the same department until 2017 and she is now professor emerita at the university.

In the early 2000s, the artist set up home on the island of Jeju, which lies south of the Korean Peninsula. The move marked a period of creative transition, during which her vocabulary underwent a transformation, shifting towards a visual language imbued by the island’s luxuriant subtropical flora and its volcanic landscapes. Under the influence of this overwhelming ambience, Kim’s attention began to focus on the daily observation of her surroundings. Informed by the lineages of jingyeong sanshuwa, the traditional ‘true-view landscape painting’, and avoiding the use of linear perspectives, she favored instead cropped close-ups of botanical specimen, indexical plant studies and wide-angled depictions of coasts and valleys. Often her depictions blur the boundaries between representation and abstraction, reflecting a dichotomy inherent in nature itself: “There are some objects that need to be expressed in a more realistic aspect, and sometimes it is necessary to express a more abstract portrayal”, says Kim, “I believe that nature does not only have figurative features; nature itself holds abstraction, and I only express it as it is.”[1]

Meditative and calm, yet at the same time radiant and seductive, her paintings exude a profound appreciation for the physical world as a site for sensory as well as spiritual experiences. For the artist, the universe, the earth and all existing life are manifestations of the ‘creation’ in an almost biblical sense, and ‘Towards’ – the title of the Milanese exhibition – reflects her own empathic gaze and posture. Echoing the pioneering essay ‘The Sense of Wonder’ by proto-environmentalist Rachel Carson, Kim says: “I believe that humans should ultimately get closer to nature. I hope through experiencing my work, viewers might feel the mystery and wonder of the world around them, and the gratitude for our presence in it”.[2]

[1] Mark Rappolt, ‘Kim Bohie: Look Outside Yourself’, Art Review (2022)
[2] Ibidem

kaufmann repetto presents Un cuore semplice (A Simple Heart), a new solo exhibition by Pierpaolo Campanini, opening in Milan on April 15. The title draws from Gustave Flaubert’s short story of the same name—a tale of quiet devotion and of an imagination capable of transforming the most humble attachments into vision.

Campanini’s practice explores the limits and possibilities of painting, constructing images that hover between presence and apparition. His works emerge from assemblages of objects, models, and memories, which find their final form in the painted surface. In this new body of work, literary references intertwine with enigmatic figures: familiar and unexpected elements coexist within the same space, like fragments of an inner narrative.

Echoing the fate of Félicité and her parrot Loulou, the exhibition evokes a fragile, visionary devotion, where images and memories take on an almost symbolic weight. Painting becomes a site where reality and imagination converge, giving shape to silent presences suspended between irony, melancholy, and wonder.

In Simone Fattal’s practice, archeology, politics, religion, literature, and history are deeply entangled. Born in Syria and raised in Lebanon, the Mediterranean is the basin from which the artist’s works spread out, equally drawing upon ancient myths and current socio-political concerns. Men, women, gods and warriors populate her universe, as well as architectural fragments and subjects from the natural world. The bronze Walker, renders a life-size figure in motion, paired with a rock that trails it like a shadow. “Man is a standing animal,” Fattal has said of her prophets and wanderers. “Before he started thinking, he got up.”

Simone Fattal will be the subject of a solo show at Musée d’art Moderne in Paris, opening on September 2026. She is this year’s recipient of the International Contemporary Art Prize (PIAC) awarded by the Prince Pierre Foundation of Monaco, and in 2024 of the Julio González International Prize and of the Berlin Grand Art Prize. She recently took part in the group exhibition Copystes at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, in the Aichi Triennale and in the 18th Istanbul Biennial. Solo shows of her works have been presented internationally at renowned institutions such as: IVAM, Valencia (2024); Louvre, Paris (2024); Secession, Vienna (2024); Portikus, Frankfurt (2023); TBA21 Academy, Ocean Space, Venice (2023); ICA Milan, Milan (2021); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2021); Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen (2020); and MOMA PS1, New York (2019). Simone Fattal has been participated in numerous biennials, such as the 60th Venice Biennale, Venice (2024); 12th Berlin Biennale, Berlin (2022); 16th Lyon Biennale, Lyon (2022) and 59th Venice Biennale, Venice (2022). Next year kaufmann repetto New York, in collaboration with Greene Naftali, will present a solo exhibition dedicated to the artist.