Holding one’s breath

Developed in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition unfolds across the eight galleries of the Procuratie in Piazza San Marco, bringing together works created over the course of seven decades. Historic and recent paintings, monumental installations and an important new site-specific commission trace the evolution of Lee Ufan’s unmistakable artistic language.
The exhibition opens with the From Point and From Line series, developed during the 1960s and 1970s. Here Lee establishes the foundations of his artistic philosophy: the painted mark as the trace of the body, of breath and of time. Every point and every line is conceived as a living entity, born from a gesture carried out with extraordinary control, often performed while holding one’s breath as the pigment gradually wears away across the canvas. This intimate relationship between physical concentration, the duration of the gesture and visual restraint has shaped Lee Ufan’s reputation as both painter and philosopher. The following galleries chart the evolution of this language. In From Winds and With Winds (1982–1991), the brushstroke becomes more fluid and rhythmic, charged with energy. Lee has described these works as “living compositions of empty space”: vast untouched fields interact with broad, taut brushstrokes that seem almost to breathe.

With Correspondance and Dialogue, developed from the 1990s onwards, the gesture returns to its essential form – a single geometric brushstroke, one monumental intervention, a surface transformed into a place of contemplation. His most recent ongoing series, Response, begun in 2021, introduces vivid reds and blues, expanding his chromatic investigation.
Sculpture occupies a pivotal role in Lee Ufan’s practice and is brought together in the exhibition’s final galleries. Since 1972, the artist has used the title Relatum for all his three-dimensional works, a term that expresses the reciprocal relationship between matter, space, light and the viewer. Among the works on display is Iron Field (1969), the celebrated installation composed of steel rods embedded in a bed of sand. It is presented alongside Relatum – Infinity, a new monumental work conceived specifically for SMAC Venice, where two large polished steel plates and two stones create an interior landscape suspended between nature and industry.
Born in Korea in 1936 and educated in philosophy in Tokyo, Lee Ufan has been a central figure in both the Japanese Mono-ha movement and the Korean Dansaekhwa movement. The exhibition reaffirms the remarkable consistency of an artistic practice that has long explored the relationships between gesture and emptiness, matter and thought, presence and perception.

Featured image: Installation view, Lee Ufan, San Marco Art Centre, Venice, 2026 Photo by Lorenzo Palmieri © Lee Ufan / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris