Tina Kim Gallery has announced U.S. representation of the estate of Kim Lim, the British Singaporean sculptor and printmaker. This June, the gallery will make its debut presentation of Lim’s work at Art Basel. A solo exhibition at Tina Kim Gallery will follow in New York, in spring 2027, marking the first solo presentation of Lim’s work in the United States. Axel Vervoordt Gallery will continue to represent the artist’s estate.
Born in Singapore in 1935 to Chinese parents, Lim spent much of her childhood in Malaysia. She moved to London in 1954, enrolling at Saint Martin’s School of Art, where she studied under the artist Anthony Caro. Later, she transferred to the Slade School of Fine Art, where she pursued both sculpture and printmaking, developing a multidisciplinary practice that would span four decades.
Untitled (wood ladder), 1973
Kim Lim
Tina Kim Gallery
Working in stone, wood, metal, and printmaking, Lim rooted her works in abstraction, seriality, and materiality. Her spare and elegant works are often associated with Minimalism. However they also explore the experience of rhythm, touch, and history. Lim’s extensive travels throughout Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia, North Africa, and the Americas were also important cultural experiences, with Cycladic sculpture and ancient Chinese bronzes influencing her works.
In 1960, Lim married the sculptor William Turnbull, whom she’d met during her studies at the Slade. The couple were admirers of the Romanian sculptor and painter Constantin Brâncuși, whose emphasis on essential form had a lasting impact on Lim’s work. Her public debut came with the landmark 1961 exhibition “26 Young Sculptors” at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts.
Ronin, 1963
Kim Lim
Tina Kim Gallery
Though she exhibited frequently, Lim never reached the stardom of some of her peers. In recent years, several significant museum exhibitions have brought new attention and deepened scholarship to her work. Major exhibitions have included “Kim Lim: The Space Between. A Retrospective” at the National Gallery Singapore in 2024, “Kim Lim: Space, Rhythm & Light” at the Hepworth Wakefield in 2023, and “Kim Lim: Water Rests, Stone Speaks” at UCCA Dune in China earlier this year.
“Kim Lim was doing something that the art world didn’t yet have the framework to fully absorb at the time: working from a genuinely global sensibility, across sculpture and printmaking, with a formal and conceptual rigor that stands up to anyone in her generation,” dealer Tina Kim said in a statement. “Lim is a crucial figure in that reassessment.”
Centaur I, 1963
Kim Lim
Tina Kim Gallery
