Gagosian, which has nearly 20 gallery locations around the world including in New York, London, and Hong Kong, will mount its first exhibition in South Korea, timed to this year’s edition of Frieze Seoul.
The inaugural outing will be a solo show for New York–based artist Derrick Adams at the APMA Cabinet, a nearly 2,000-square-foot, ground-level project space in the headquarters of Amorepacific, the cosmetics company owned by ARTnews Top 200 Collector Suh Kyung-bae. The exhibition will run September 3 to October 12.
This isn’t the first time Amorepacific has collaborated with a mega-gallery in Seoul. When Pace opened its expanded Seoul location in 2022, in tandem with the first edition of Frieze Seoul, it did so with a teahouse by Osulloc, one of Amorepacific’s subsidiaries.
Last August, Gagosian hired Jiyoung Lee to lead its operations in South Korea. Lee had previously worked in similar capacities for Western galleries like Sprüth Magers and Esther Schipper.
For the exhibition, titled “The Strip,” Adams will debut new works showing mannequin heads in display windows at beauty shops that are related to his earlier series, “Style Variations,” featuring mannequins with brightly colored wigs set against stark white backgrounds. “I’m always picking subjects that are activated by my interest in drawing in the viewer,” Adams told ARTnews in 2021.
In a statement, Gagosian senior director Nick Simunovic said, “It’s a tremendous honor for Gagosian to be the first gallery to program this extraordinary space at Amorepacific’s headquarters. The venue is an ideal location to celebrate Derrick Adams’s first exhibition in Korea and to share his work with such an important community of art enthusiasts and collectors.”
