Global Sae-A lines up Chagall, Hockney and Kusama for century-spanning painting survey

The gallery inside the Gangnam headquarters of apparel exporter Global Sae-A Group is going blue-chip this fall with the likes of Chagall, de Kooning and Hockney under one roof.

Opening Sept. 15 and running through Jan. 9, the century-wide survey "Highlights of Modern Painting: Portraits of an Era" at Global Sae-A Art Space brings together 20 works by 14 artists that move across surrealism, postwar abstraction and the figurative paintings of recent years.

The show is split into three sections. The first, "A Walk Through Dreams," pairs Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux with Marc Chagall, two painters who turned to dreams and the unconscious in the shadow of the world wars.

"Enigmatic Abstraction" sets Willem de Kooning, Yayoi Kusama and Lynne Drexler alongside two present-day painters, Peter Halley and Marina Perez Simao. The selection is intended as an overview of the genre, from abstract expressionism to its contemporary iterations.

The final section, "The Return of the Figure," brings together David Hockney, Salvo, Nicolas Party, Hilary Pecis, Jonathan Gardner, Adrian Ghenie and George Condo. Each work takes an earlier movement as a starting point and places people and objects at the center of the canvas.

The show comes months after the deaths of two of its headliners; Hockney died in June at 88, Kusama in August at 97. It is curated by Park Mi-hwa, formerly a senior curator at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art.

The venue opened in July 2022 as S2A, backed by Global Sae-A chairman Kim Woong-ki, one of the country's most prominent collectors.

Its inaugural show was a 40-work Kusama survey, then billed as the artist's largest ever in Korea. Later that year, the gallery put on view Kim Whanki's "Universe 5-IV-71 #200," the priciest Korean artwork ever sold at auction, as part of a 17-work solo show.

Since then, the program has largely focused on Korean painting, from a 2024 dansaekhwa group show to a survey of postwar Korean modernism earlier this year.