Lee Ung-No at Centre Pompidou

The exhibition is a major retrospective on painter and sculptor Lee Ung-no (Seoul, 1904 – Paris, 1989), made possible by a donation of fourteen paintings and three sculptures from his wife and son. Trained in Korea and Japan in both ink-painting and Western painting, Lee Ung-no first showed in the West in New York in 1957, he moved to France in 1960, and abandoned the poetic landscapes typical of his work until then. His turn to a radical abstraction marked by a “matterist” language reflected his speedy assimilation of Parisian Art Informel. Deeply affected by the bloody repression of the Gwangju Uprising of 1980, Lee Ung-no embarked on his “Crowds” series, returning to the ink painting he had never entirely abandoned to compose a vibrant appeal for popular freedom.