Join The Collection to save, track, and explore works like this.

Byron Kim — Sunday Painting 4/29/01
Byron Kim

Sunday Painting 4/29/01

2001

A square of pale sky occupies the entirety of Sunday Painting 4/29/01, its surface held in quiet suspension between observation and abstraction. Byron Kim painted this work on the date inscribed in the title, part of an ongoing series he began in 2001 in which each small panel records the color of the sky as he perceived it on a specific Sunday. The practice is at once systematic and deeply personal, tethering the painted object to a singular moment in lived time. Acrylic and gouache on panel yield a surface that is neither purely luminous nor fully opaque, hovering in the ambiguous register that sky itself occupies when glimpsed and then remembered. Kim is best known for Synecdoche, his monumental grid of monochromes matching the skin tones of friends, family, and strangers, and the Sunday Paintings extend that preoccupation with color as a carrier of identity and experience into a durational, almost diaristic form. Each panel in the series functions simultaneously as a record and a relic, a document of atmospheric fact and a meditation on perception, memory, and the passage of time. The modest scale, 35.6 by 35.6 centimeters, is deliberate, placing the work in intimate conversation with the viewer rather than asserting the commanding presence of large-format abstraction. For collectors, this work offers entry into one of the most quietly rigorous conceptual painting practices in contemporary American art. The serial nature of the project means that individual panels gain resonance in relation to one another, yet each remains self-sufficient as an object, complete in its simplicity and grounded in a specific, irretrievable moment. The panel is currently held in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, underscoring the institutional recognition the series has earned since its inception.

Medium
Acrylic and goauche on panel
Overall

Start the Discussion

Request access to join the discussion

Collectors with works by Byron Kim

About this work

Byron Kim, Sunday Painting 4/29/01, 2001

A square of pale sky occupies the entirety of Sunday Painting 4/29/01, its surface held in quiet suspension between observation and abstraction. Byron Kim painted this work on the date inscribed in the title, part of an ongoing series he began in 2001 in which each small panel records the color of the sky as he perceived it on a specific Sunday. The practice is at once systematic and deeply personal, tethering the painted object to a singular moment in lived time. Acrylic and gouache on panel yield a surface that is neither purely luminous nor fully opaque, hovering in the ambiguous register that sky itself occupies when glimpsed and then remembered. Kim is best known for Synecdoche, his monumental grid of monochromes matching the skin tones of friends, family, and strangers, and the Sunday Paintings extend that preoccupation with color as a carrier of identity and experience into a durational, almost diaristic form. Each panel in the series functions simultaneously as a record and a relic, a document of atmospheric fact and a meditation on perception, memory, and the passage of time. The modest scale, 35.6 by 35.6 centimeters, is deliberate, placing the work in intimate conversation with the viewer rather than asserting the commanding presence of large-format abstraction. For collectors, this work offers entry into one of the most quietly rigorous conceptual painting practices in contemporary American art. The serial nature of the project means that individual panels gain resonance in relation to one another, yet each remains self-sufficient as an object, complete in its simplicity and grounded in a specific, irretrievable moment. The panel is currently held in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, underscoring the institutional recognition the series has earned since its inception.

Medium
Acrylic and goauche on panel
Dimensions
overall: 35.6 x 35.6 cm
Year
2001
Seen at
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)

More works by Byron Kim

Collected by

Mihail Lari