The exhibition will take place in both Gallery One and Gallery Two and will be the first time S│2 London dedicates its whole space to a single artist. In collaboration with the artist’s estate, the gallery will publish an accompanying monograph on Kim Lim’s life and work, which will be celebrated with a book launch and panel discussion during Frieze Week. The monograph will contain unseen archival material, a comprehensive discussion of her sculptural practice and printmaking, republished texts and new commissions. In conversation with the current exhibition, Speech Acts: Reflection-Imagination-Repetition, at Manchester Art Gallery which features Lim’s work, the new monograph will also include a new commissioned essay by curator Hammad Nasar.Born in Singapore, Kim Lim travelled to London in the mid-1950s to pursue a career as an artist, enrolling in St Martin’s and Slade School. Fascinated by the work of Brancusi and Hellenistic sculptures and temples she had seen on her travels as a student, Lim began creating expressive reliefs in prints and carved stone which gave visual form to her an interest in the unity and harmony in the cosmos.
S│2 reflects on Lim’s body of work by connecting the artist’s earliest forms to their evolution throughout the 1980s and 1990s, drawing attention to Lim’s uniquely privileged position in the history of British contemporary sculpture. Notably, her work was exhibited at the First Hayward Annual in 1977. The following year, Lim served as one of the five women on the Hayward Annual’s all-female selection committee in 1978, alongside Tess Jaray, Liliane Lijn, Gillian Wise Ciobaratu and Rita Donagh.