
Sunday Painting 6/10
2001
A spare blue sky occupies the entirety of this small square panel, rendered in acrylic and gouache with the quiet attentiveness that defines Byron Kim's long-running Sunday Paintings series. Begun in 2001, the project grew from a personal discipline: each week, Kim would step outside, observe the sky directly above him, and translate that specific atmospheric moment into paint on a modestly scaled support. The result is neither landscape nor abstraction in any conventional sense, but something closer to a record of presence, a painted notation of a particular Sunday's light and weather held within a format that rewards sustained looking. Kim is widely recognized for Synecdoche, his monumental grid of skin-tone panels begun in 1991 and now in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum, and the Sunday Paintings extend that same concern with how paint can carry meaning beyond formal appearance. The 35.6 by 35.6 centimeter panel is deliberately intimate, scaled to the hand and to domestic space rather than to institutional walls, and that modesty is central to the work's effect. Each painting in the series is dated, tethering the cool expanse of color to a specific moment in lived time. The blue here is neither symbolic nor decorative; it is phenomenological, an attempt to honor what the eye actually encountered on a single morning or afternoon. For collectors, this work offers a rare combination of conceptual rigor and visual ease. It sits comfortably within conversations around process-based painting, time-based art, and the poetics of everyday observation, while remaining genuinely pleasurable to live with. Acquired directly from SFMOMA's collection, it carries institutional provenance of the highest order and represents one of the earliest and most resolved examples from a series that has accumulated into one of the more quietly significant bodies of work in contemporary American painting.
- Medium
- Acrylic and goauche on panel
- Overall
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