Sprüth Magers, a gallery with locations in Berlin, London, Los Angeles, and New York, now represents Mire Lee, the artist tapped to do this fall’s Turbine Hall commission for Tate Modern.
Lee will continue to be represented by Tina Kim Gallery in New York and Antenna Space in Shanghai. She is currently featured in Sprüth Magers’s group exhibition “territory,” which opened during Berlin Gallery Weekend.
Based between Berlin and Seoul, where she was born, Lee has recently established herself as one of her generation’s most closely watched sculptors, making uncanny installations about the body and its viscera. She had institutional solo shows at the MMK Frankfurt in 2022 and the New Museum in New York in 2023, and was included in the 2022 editions of the Venice Biennale, the Carnegie International, and the Busan Biennale.
Her 2021 exhibition at Schinkel Pavillon, a two-person outing with late Swiss artist H. R. Giger, was a breakout for the artist, raising her profile outside her home country.
“With the recent works,” Lee told Art in America of her work in the show, “I was very interested in the vore fetish. Vore is when you want to be devoured by someone or vice versa. It’s subcultural, almost, but I see it as a universal metaphor. It’s a desire so strong that you want to unite with another being. Vore is also something you can never realize. The core quality of vore, for me, its impossibility.”
Gallery cofounder Philomene Magers first saw Lee’s work in person at the Schinkel Pavillon show, having already kept tabs on the artist’s career. Lee’s emphasis on pushing the boundaries of sculpture was among the many reasons why Magers was drawn to the work.
“What Mire is talking about exists on many different levels,” Magers told ARTnews in a phone interview. “On the one hand, it deals with the body and has a specific physicality and some kind of fluidity. You feel like you might encounter a new species with every work. On the other hand, there is this strong interest in poetry and literature, and a strong feminist aspect in the work that I find tremendously interesting.”
Lee joins a roster that includes a range of artists Louise Lawler, Barbara Kruger, Martine Syms, Anne Imhof, Nora Turato, Rosemarie Trockel, Kaari Upson, Gretchen Bender, Sylvie Fleury, Cindy Sherman, Robert Morris, Donald Judd, and Kara Walker.
“Our program brings together a lot of artists who are asking very specific questions in the time they’re living in—or the time they have been living in, with we regard to the estates we represent—and they’re finding a formulation for artistic expression for contemporary life,” Magers said.
She added, “We’re looking for pioneers in their field, and Mire is definitely one of them.”
