Mison Kim
Now and Then and Again
5/1/26 - 6/5/26
48+ Site Specific grid painting installation, 2026
Day and Night, 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 67” x 62” and Transformer, 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 100” x 75”
Then and Now and Again
Mison Kim
Mison Kim’s grid paintings are interconnected. The geometric and organic forms weave together, following and breaking from their grid format. Shaped forms move across the physical grid of canvases but never sit still within it. The grid is steady and architectural but the compositions slide over it, finding their own confident positions. Kim’s line work offers a counterpoint. It is dense, thready, obsessive. Drawn by hand, it moves intuitively. Tangled, searching, and precise all at once. Where the flat color blocking feels declarative, the line feels lived-in. The two meet without canceling each other out. Structure and free flow find a way to hold together.
Transformer, 2025, Acrylic on canvas 100” x 75” and , Paint Me a River, 2024 Acrylic on canvas 83” x 62”
The grid does not restrain. It scaffolds and softens at the edges, holding rhythm and energy in place while allowing for drift, overlap, and secondary compositions to emerge. There are bursts and there is restraint. Flat, open areas sit beside tightly worked clusters. The paintings feel at once architectural and organic—like something built and something grown. Time is embedded in the work. The drawings carry hours, days, a daily practice that reads like a journal. Today, yesterday and tomorrow, histories of process are layered and continuous. The repetition is not static; it accumulates, loops, and shifts. The work moves between loud, dramatic passages and quieter, sustained moments of intensity.
Either Here or There Series, 40" x 30", Ink on paper, 2022, 2023 and Teeter Totter 75" x 56" Acrylic on canvas, 2024
Teeter Totter (detail) and 48+ (detail)
48+
A grid-based project in the back gallery emphasizes connection and change over time. Composed of individual squares mounted on a larger painted mural framework, the underlying structure of Kim’s paintings, the piece will evolve over the course of the show. As works are taken out of the grid into the world, the patterned foundation becomes more visible, activating what remains. Each square leaves with someone, carrying part of the whole with it. What begins as a unified field disperses, then reconnects through the people who hold it. By the end of the exhibition, the work exists both in the gallery and beyond it—linked through memory, ownership, and experience.
48+ An installation of 50 connected paintings mounted on painted wall mural. 2026, Acrylic on paper, 12”x 12” each
A 12” x 12” square painting from 48+ mural installation and Day and Night, 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 67” x 62”
Then and Now and Again speaks to this cycle: the act of making, the passage of time, and the way we return to see something differently each time. The works hold both firm structures/order and looseness/tangled connections reflecting humanity within society; the grid supporting but does not hindering flow.
Mison Kim was born in Seoul but lives and works in New York’s Hudson Valley. She has an MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute.
Along with creating and exhibiting works that have placed her art in collections worldwide, Mison has been a fashion designer, illustrator, and consultant for companies such as Tory Burch, Talbot's, Demylee, and Old Navy. She was also the founder of an international art group, K-NFT, which created a forum for cultural interchanges and the sharing of artistic practices across borders, including artists from countries such as Korea, Japan, India, the United States, Canada, and more.
Mison is also a children’s book author and illustrator. Her award-winning Dooleyglot Bilingual Board Book series permitted Mison to work directly with young children to develop her visual-priming approach to language acquisition.
