Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce McArthur Binion’s first shows in Asia, opening simultaneously in both Hong Kong and Seoul. The Hong Kong presentation will be presented jointly with Massimo De Carlo, which will also host an exhibition of Binion’s work in their Hong Kong gallery. Spanning all three spaces, these joint exhibitions present an unprecedented opportunity to view new work by the 72-year-old American artist who has been garnering increasing international attention. There will be a reception for the artist on May 24, 2019 from 5pm—7pm at 74-18, Yulgok-ro 3-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul.

Over the course of his career, Binion has defied classification as an artist, beginning his highly distinctive, innovative, and self-referential practice at the prestigious Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1973. After graduation, Binion moved to New York City and found himself in the midst of a hotbed of artistic activity—socializing and working among artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Brice Marden, and Sol LeWitt. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, his style evolved from more gestural abstraction to include increasingly pared-down, colorful, and geometric abstraction. Binion’s earliest incorporation of found material dates to the 1980s, when he realized the potential for building an “under-conscious,” or layers of reference material, below his freehand painting. During the mid-1990s, Binion incorporated his first personal mementos into his work, and in the early 2000s he developed a unique amalgamation of these aesthetic elements, incorporating photocopies of pages from his personal address book, his birth certificate, and family photos beneath dense drawn or painted grids. These works made their international debut in 2017 at the Venice Biennale.