Notes on Kim Lim

The exhibition Daiga Grantina. Notes on Kim Lim traces the work of the Singaporean-British artist Kim Lim (1936 – 1997) in a contemporary and associative exploration, placing her œuvre in dialogue with the sculptures of the Latvian artist Daiga Grantina (*1985). Kim Lim's work includes abstract sculptures in wood and stone as well as works on paper that reflect on the relationship between art and nature. Daiga Grantiņa uses a wide range of everyday materials in her practice, from the synthetic to the organic, often reversing and transcending the boundaries of their traditional use to create associative formations. There are striking similarities and parallels between Daiga Grantina's and Kim Lim's sculptures, particularly in terms of their mutability and elasticity, which are constitutive for both artists. At the same time, the differences between the works become apparent, creating an effective tension.

Being the first presentation of Kim Lim's work in Switzerland, the exhibition is not intended to be a retrospective, but rather looks at her work from an artistic perspective. The ‘notes’ on Lim's work will be continued in an artist publication through the eyes of the photographer Katalin Deér (*1965, Palo Alto, California, USA, lives and works in St. Gallen, CH) and the poet Ilma Rakusa (*1946, Rimavská Sobota, Czechoslovakia, lives and works in Zurich, CH). The book understands itself as a poetic extension of the exhibition and is designed by the Parisian graphic artist Toan Vu-Huu.

The book launch will take place on 4 May 2025 as part of a day programme at the Kunstmuseum Appenzell. On the same occasion, sound artist and composer Anna Zaradny (*1977, Szczecin, PL, lives and works in Warsaw, PL) will contribute her sonic ‘note’ to the exhibition.

Curated by Daiga Grantina and Stefanie Gschwend

Kim Lim (1936 – 1997, Singapore) devoted herself to abstract sculpture for more than four decades, using wood, stone and industrial materials. In parallel to her sculptural work, she pursued printmaking and drawing throughout her career. The unifying element across the different periods of her work is Lim's enduring interest in light, space and rhythm.

Lim spent much of her early childhood in Penang and Malacca, MYS. At the age of 18, she moved to London and studied woodcarving at Saint Martin's School of Art, London, UK (1954 – 1956). She then concentrated on printmaking at the Slade School of Art, London, UK graduating in 1960. Her first retrospective took place in 1979 at the Roundhouse Gallery in London, UK in 1995 she showed her work at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK and in 1999 at the Singapore Art Museum, SGP, but it is only recently that her work has attracted international attention. In 2018, the first major solo exhibition Kim Lim: Sculpting Light took place at STPI, Singapore, SGP. This was followed by the survey show Kim Lim: Carving and Printing at the Tate Britain, London, UK (2020) and most recently the retrospective Kim Lim. The Space Between at the National Gallery Singapore, SGP (2024/25). Group exhibitions include Breaking The Mould: Sculpture by Women since 1945, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK (2020); Minimalism: Space. Light. Object, National Gallery Singapore, SGP (2018); Speech Acts: Reflection-Imagination-Repetition, Manchester Art Gallery, UK (2018).

Lim's work resists both the modernist universalisms of Eurocentric art history and an essentialist categorisation of her practice within a pan-Asian cultural space. Through extensive travels to Italy, Cambodia, India, Japan and Egypt, she has broadened her studies and coordinated a visual vocabulary for her own practice from a multiple spatio-temporal field of ancient and contemporary sculptural works. Her grammar derives less from a clarification of abstract forms than from a physical encounter with sculptures in their concrete surroundings.

Daiga Grantina (*1985, Saldus, Latvia lives and works in Paris, France) explores the relationships between materials, gestures and space in her sculptures. Her abstract vocabulary is based on bodies, landscapes and the organic and confronts synthetic materials with associative power.

Grantina studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg, DE and at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna, AUT.

Her solo exhibitions were Four Sides of a Shadow at Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture, Hasselt, BEL (2024), Lauka telpa at Riga Bourse Museum, Riga, LV (2022), Moth Mothers at Palace Enterprise, Copenhagen, DK (2022), Atem, Lehm ‘Fiato, Argilla’ at GAMeC, Bergamo, IT (2021); Learning From Feathers at Liebaert Projects, Kortrijk, BE (2021); Temples at Emalin, London, UK (2021); What Eats Around Itself at the New Museum, New York, US (2020), Saules Suns for the Latvian Pavilion at the 58. Venice Biennale, IT (2019), Toll at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, FR (2018), Pillars Sliding off Coat-ee at Kunstverein Hamburg, DE (2017) and Lauka telpa at kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga, LV (2016). Her works have been in group exhibitions at the Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw, PL (2024), Kunstverein Göttingen, DE (2023), Kunstmuseum Bern, CH (2020), the Busan Biennale, Yeongdo Museum of Contemporary Art, Busan, KR (2020), Galerie Joseph Tang, Paris, FR (2019), Baltic Triennial 13, Riga, LV (2018) Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, LT (2018), Musée d'Orsay, Paris, FR (2018), Kunsthalle Mainz, DE (2017), Kunsthaus Bregenz, AUT (2016) and Bergen Kunsthall, NO (2016).

Bridges / Wings

Kim Lim's attention to curves, lines and surfaces, to the rhythm of structure and the relationship of sculpture to space, is already evident in this first exhibition space. The geometric forms of the two works Link I (1975) and Brigde II (1976) reveal the working and creation processes of the sculptures. The stacking and layering, as well as the juxtaposition of edged wood, create a structure that is not static, but leaves open the possibility of different constellations. In the 1970s, Lim became increasingly interested in the tension between verticals, horizontals and angles. Light also became an important element in the structure of the work, making it more ‘physical’ and ‘comprehensible’, as Lim expressed it.

These works are committed to a minimalism that defies art-historical categorisation and instead connects with the symbolic, seeking to evoke the presence of something absent. The titles of the sculptures refer to a unifying element and speak of the relationships between the forms. This aspect is also apparent in Daiga Grantina's work Sarrasvati (2020), which rises up into the space as a gesture. Made of fabric, weave, wood and silicone, the work inevitably evokes the flight and migration of birds, whose movement connects different spheres to each other through their movement. The reference to birds can also be found in the title of the work, which refers to the Indian goddess Sarasvati and her companion animal, the goose, the swan or the peacock. The iconography shows the deity in the centre of a lake, which is interpreted as a symbol of primordial water and the beginning of creation, among other things.

The works of both artists are rooted in a potential for transformation and parallels can be found in the understanding of the bridging function of images, which mediate between the most diverse cultures, both historically and spatially distant from each other.

Water / Wind

Flowing water seem very calm. Yet many cubic metres of water flow over the rock every second, silently digging furrows into its interior. The river rises, intangible lines appear and disappear in the shimmering mass of water, the river sinks, releasing the formed bodies of the stones into the air, where some of their parts dry out.

In the 1980s, Kim Lim turned her attention increasingly to natural forms. At the same time, she began to work in stone and marble. The static properties of the material contrasted with the dynamic rhythms of organic forms, which the artist saw as a productive field of tension and a starting point for her stone sculptures. In many works, the marble was worked with incised lines and textures so that the stone appeared to have been shaped by the elements. With simple, slightly curved lines that Lim cut into the stone, she suggested movement and evoked water or wind. She tried to give the material a lightness and softness, as exemplified in Source 2 (1988). Wind Stone (1992) is flatter. She cut a Hoptonwood stone evenly so that the volume looks more like a drawing than a solid form.

In Daiga Grantina's new work Parce que (2024), curved, dark wooden elements run along the walls like a spatial score. As the eye follows the line of the composition, it forms a sound wave and spreads invisibly across the room. In a sense, the wooden wedges create an inversion of Lim's carved stones, transforming negative space into form. Their black colour absorbs the light, accentuating the contours and making the elements appear like shadows on the wall. It is as if the wood is cutting into the volume of the exhibition space, carving out the existing material. Grantina enables the two artistic resonance spaces to be connected, suggesting the existence of a flow of energy that permeates all things.

Bodies of Matter

In her sculptures, Daiga Grantina sediments organic and synthetic materials into form complex, unstable bodies. In Which Part of the Body (after Orta) (2022), an amorphous silicone surface curves around itself and rests on a painted wooden surface. In Grantina's work, the material experiments function as metabolic organs that build up and break down the sculptural body. The flat piece of wood and the amorphous silicone absorb elements of other materials. The wood is soaked in ink on one side, while the silicone contains structures of fabric and traces of pigment. The silicone seems to be the shed skin of a former physical state and is temporarily given a new body in independent processes of movement and action.

The meeting of the materials is not coincidental, but rather a matter of relationships for which Grantina finds models in the plant world. The work, created on Lake Orta in northern Italy, seems to follow an anatomical principle of the symbiotic life forms of fungi and algae, which stabilise as lichens to form a morphological unit. At the same time, the material and artistic processes in the sculptures come to a standstill. Daiga Grantina sees this moment as co-determined by her sculpture. An independent physicality is attributed to the artistic material, to which the artist refers. The title of her work raises the question of the dimensions to which human and non-human bodies are linked.

Early in her practice, Lim moved from figurative works to an interest in in-between spaces and elementary forms. In Kiss (1959), Kim Lim chisels two heads, one round and one elongated, out of a Portland stone. The filled-in space in between them holds the two heads in tension as they kiss. In their elaboration, the figurative faces remain permanent and increasingly dissolve into the tool marks and the rough stone. As a figurative form, the dimension of Ring (1972) remains unclear in relation to the human body. It is only through the grinding of the surface in tight circular movements that the gestural dimension of a physically strenuous work is imprinted in the form of a curling trace.

Elasticity

Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Kim Lim created her sculptures mainly in basic rhythmic forms, in which each element forms a balanced whole and is brought into equilibrium. Twice (1966) exemplifies these characteristics and demonstrates the artist's interest in balance, colour, form and her concept of ‘less elaboration and more strength’. In the work, a vertical form is duplicated and placed horizontally. The monochrome brass forms are mounted on a narrow base that defines their relationship and aligns them with their architectural surroundings. They thus appear as negative spaces of large hemispherical forms that slip away into an imaginary, dimensionless space. Thereby the basic forms themselves take on fluid and elastic qualities.

Versatility and elasticity are characteristic and constitutive of the artistic practices of Kim Lim and Daiga Grantina. Both artists seem to be less concerned with representing nature than with reproducing its active forces without organising them. In their sculptural translation into new and free forms, the artists find a proximity to unavailable dynamics. Lim with her own basic elements, Grantina in the transformation of her source material.

Daiga Grantina sees her works as mediators between earthly and cosmic spaces that require an elasticity of our imagination and feeling. Grantina draws inspiration for the development of her material processes from the numerous adaptive properties of biological life, such as coexistence and self-replication. In Kūka (2021), the materials strive in all directions. The form of an abstracted placenta, made up of square fields of densely arranged bird feathers, is the work's enraptured centre. For the title, Grantina chose the Latvian name of the organ, which is the only one in the human body that can be formed after birth, which supplies growing foetuses with nutrients and oxygen. The organ marks the coexistence of two living beings and is then rejected again. Here, elasticity remains not merely a sculptural possibility of taking shape, but takes on a form-giving character that leaves both individuals equally modified.

Light

In 1977, Kim Lim exhibited Intervals I – part 1 (1973) at the Hayward Annual Exhibition in London. Among 14 male exhibitors, Lim was the only woman and non-white person. The following year, in an attempt to redress this glaring imbalance, the Hayward appointed Kim Lim to its selection committee of five female artists. It was a pivotal moment: for the first time, a major British institution showed an exhibition featuring mainly women.

In notes on Intervals, which Kim Lim wrote for the Tate Gallery in March 1977, she explained that these vertical works, which open up a space between them when angled against a wall, put the incidence of light at the centre of her interest. ‘Sometimes using light to echo the forms by shadows – multiplying the rhythm and changing it according to the varying light, light heightening in the sense of space being trapped/squeezed’. The light becomes part of the work, transforming the idea of the sculpture into a physical entity. The works remain porous as a membrane for changing light conditions, like flags that give visual form to an invisible movement of air.

The question of the sculptural properties of light developed in Daiga Grantina's work from earlier explorations in experimental film. She became increasingly interested in the space between the projector and the screen, into which she inserted reflective, sculptural bodies. They seem to materialise the expansive light cone of the projection at certain points and translate it chromatically in their colour. The visibility and colourfulness of the sculptures are thus modalities of a space of light that surrounds everything. Grantina's works remind us that works of art always remain part of a colour spectrum that encompasses the entire visible world. In Blue Sun (2022), the source of light is at the centre. The sun, or plural suns, form an imaginary horizon for the exhibition space that knows no top or bottom. As if it were the scene of a cosmological dawn, it opens up as a place and moment for crystallising possibilities.

Birds / Snakes

This room brings together works that connect with various spheres such as the realms of water, earth and air as well as with animal associations that relate to the elements or other worlds through their symbolism. Parallels can also be recognised in the interest in the essence of geometry, whereby the form does not stand on its own, but merges with flowing and nature-related elements.

Use of a Comb (2021) consists of shimmering feathers that Daiga Grantina has applied tightly to squares of fabric. Depending on the angle from which they are viewed, they appear in different hues of rich green, beguiling blue, deep black or shaded brown. At the upper edge of the work, she applied thin, overlapping layers of colour to recreate the almost hallucinogenic effect of the feathers – the brush as an extension of the feather hairs. The work is unusually geometric for the artist, who tends to work with an organic and physical vocabulary of form. The squares have become the inner organisation of the work, capable of conveying both colour and meaning and becoming the quiet sound of her process.

Kim Lim's Spiral II (1983) consists of seven Portland stones arranged in an incomplete circle. Each stone bears two grooved lines, alluding to another series of interrupted circles. One is tempted to rearrange and realign the pieces – at least in one's mind – either to complete the circle by joining the slabs or to extend it by increasing the distance between the individual pieces. The heights of the elements differ slightly, creating an undulating or winding movement as the eye glides over the work. The work exists in three variations, including an outdoor version and one that is not arranged in a spiral but as a wavy line and is called Naga. It remains unclear whether these are the same stones that suggest a snake when rearranged. In Hindu mythology, Nagas are semi-divine beings, half human, half cobra, who are often associated with guarding treasure.

Branches turned silver (2022) was created on a winter's day by the River Aare in Bern, when the light made the branches of the trees appear silvery grey. The sculpture is made of plywood that has been cut and stacked and painted with different layers of colour. The material and colour have changeable properties and create the impression of a figure emerging from the water. The wooden object appears archaic and raw, its edges are unfinished and frayed, making its surface tangible as an ambivalent phenomenon between inside and outside.

Proximity / Distance

In go the distance (2024), branches lose their dimension as fragments of a coherent organism and appear to be variations of other works by Daiga Grantina in a different scale. The branches spontaneously change direction as they make their way through the dim space, as if an expansive energy were being discharged in localised flashes of light. The silver colour completes their surface and makes them permeable to changing light conditions. In this way, they refer more to their immediate surroundings rather than revealing their inner nature.

In the 1990s, Kim Lim increasingly endeavoured to lend the stone a lightness and softness, as in Syncopation No. 2 (1995), where a large piece of slate was worked with regular cuts so that it resembled a drawing rather than a solid form. The filigree removal of the slate creates a linear negative space. Kim Lim here does not seem to be interested in the repetition of these seemingly endless lines, but rather in the concrete breaking point of the space in between, where different parallel linear spaces collide. Continuity is not achieved through the linear, but in the similarity of the inner relationships of different linear zones.

The two artists' works in this space are equally fragmented, emphasising their fragility and revealing a spontaneous closeness in their tangible similarities.

Body / Shell

Grantina's large-scale sculptural assemblage Joana's Joy (2024) is inspired by the natural world and is reminiscent of vegetation and bodies. The sculpture uses synthetic materials that have dynamic and changeable qualities, linking together and creating flowing transitions. Joana's Joy creates a folding and cyclical movement that creates its own space and at the same time forms a figure. It acts as a dwelling and a protective shell. The amorphous structure exudes vitality and a strong physical presence, while at the same time appearing vulnerable and ephemeral.

The theme of space is reflected in Kim Lim’s three-dimensional and graphic works. We see structures that look like architecture or shells, sculptures or symbols. Lim's interest in the visual languages of ancient civilisations and the meaning of images that underlie the various cultures of the world is evident throughout.

Grantina's work connects not only with the fluid and nature-based aspects of Kim Lim's work, but also in the perception of structures that exist as hybrids between body and space. While Grantina's work relates more directly to the body, Lim, whose work is more spatial and nature-based, creates this through the movement and rhythm inherent in her structures.

Vibration

The extensive travels Kim Lim undertook together with her husband William Turnbull from 1962 onwards to Italy, Cambodia, India, Japan and Egypt that took the artist to archaeological excavation sites, museums and ancient cultural spaces. Place names and names of mythological figures appear as references in the titles of many of Lim's works. The early work Narcissus (1959) is a sculpture consisting of two bronze pieces mounted on, and reflected in, a black marble slab. The individual elements evoke the interior view of a body, of interconnected organs that form volumes, stretch, swell and taper.

In her early work, Kim Lim was interested in elements that she placed as forms in spatial contexts in order to activate the tension between them as space. In Narcissus, the increased attention to the space between the individual elements of a sculpture is evident. The artist emphasised her approach in which ‘sometimes using space / intervals / silences to punctuate the structure; sometimes using forms in repetition to build up a rhythm in order to achieve some kind of resonance / vibration’.

The vibration that Kim Lim sought in her spatial exploration also seems to crystallise in her interest in water surfaces in the print series of the 1980s. The graphic element of her prints are formalised intervals of a water surface moved by waves and vibrating in the gleaming sunlight.

Daiga Grantina's works are equally informed by the effects of material surfaces and their medial possibilities. During a stay at Lake Orta in Italy, she was inspired by the lake's large body of water, which in quiet moments reflects the pre-alpine surroundings almost indistinguishably in its surface. Grantina is less interested in the clear reflection of the surroundings than in situations that dissolve the mirror image into a mass of movement and reflections. Echoes of fish, birds, insects and boats moving in and on the water, expanding in a ring. The wind that lifts and ruffles the water. Floating wood, washed-out leaves and plastic debris combine with the reflected colours of the sky. Like the self-image of Narcissus, which disappears the moment his tears fall into the water, the clear image of the surroundings is frayed into glistening points of light and rippling shades of colour. The surface of the water does not lose its reflective function in its vibration, but is transformed into a complex of spreading details.

Movement / Flow

The space is inhabited by a sculpture that oscillates between geometric and organic form and can be walked through. Daiga Grantina's work rhythmises the existing architecture through its structure, which is characterised by buckled struts, creating a tension between body, space and sculpture. Clinging, craving (2022) simultaneously creates both a space and a nonspace. The form evokes associations of dwelling, linked to images of intimate spatiality, while the collapsed centres, in contrast, convey a sense of instability. The space appears elastic and dynamic, as if it could expand and contract again, blurring the contrast between inside and outside. Movement is also suggested by the paint, which behaves like water on the surface. The layer of colour covers the metal like a membrane and dissolves the industrial effect in a painterly gesture.

Free Forms (1968/69) are minimalist-looking etchings of floating forms in which Kim Lim explores energies, fluidity, movement and the big bang. The line is conceived in a constantly repeating movement and the overlapping of lines. Study for Water Piece (1979) stacks five curved pools of water on top of each other in a continuation of the forms and emphasisations of the etchings. Lim was concerned with the rhythms of life, with a particular interest in the elements of water, air and the shifting quality of light. As in the work Spiral II (Room 6), there are several variations of water basins in different materials and sizes. Three basins are on display: one made of wood, another made of plaster, and one made of bronze that can be filled with water.

Formation / Transformation

The articulation of colour and form in different media interacts with the mutability of the sculptures, which by their very nature create places of transformation.

Centaur I (1963) is a contrasting and striking blue figure that emphasises the effect of colour in sculpture. The work is reminiscent of a papercut and, despite its size, has a graphic quality. In the title, the artist refers to the centaurs, who, as mythological hybrid creatures and personifications of the storm, have an inherent capacity for metamorphosis.

Swallows (2022) by Daiga Grantina, like Kim Lim's two works Untitled (1963) as well as Minus 1 and Minus 2 (1966), is indeed changeable and can be shown in different configurations. Swallows is composed of six wing-like elements that can form a circle or a freer shape, and vary in tones from orange to green. It has an inner and an outer ring of colour. The artist associates the sculpture with a sundial, which she can arrange in different ways depending on the time and place. All these sculptures reveal not only their own form, but also the space that surrounds them. In this way, the individual elements of Lim's works seem to contain the space in between and are echoed in a concrete gesture of holding.

In contrast to her other sculptures, which unfold fluidly into the space or occupy it as organic structures, in Wide Triangle (2024) Grantina has developed the form on the flat surface. In their rawness, the imperfect triangles look like mock-ups whose surfaces reflect or absorb sunlight to varying degrees, from clear plastic to various fabrics. Although the sculptures resemble material tests, they have an artefactual presence and are reminiscent of a portal that, like a transitional element, leads to another world or another emotional state.

Time / Interval

Throughout her career and her cyclical working method, Kim Lim has developed her prints and sculptures in parallel, exploring analogue interests in space, intervals and pauses. Thus the austere geometric forms of the Ladder series (1972) are found in the painted wooden structures of Intervals (1973). The woodcuts A minor (1979) reveal the drawings of the stone from her sculptures of the 1970s and the graphic treatment of slate panels in the 1990s. The sculptural qualities in the carving, hollowing and marking of surfaces are as evident as a sensibility in her prints. Lim sees a difference in the duration of the working processes. Printing techniques allow for quicker feedback on ideas of form than the time-consuming process of working with stone and wood.

In her print series Time Shift (1993), Kim Lim specifically addresses the temporal dimension of her artistic practice, which spans various time registers. In it, temporal differences are explored with in a visual translation in colour print. The chromatic subtlety of the printed colour elements marks differences in light, which are condensed in their transparent overlays. Lim finds inspiration for the geometric form of the elements in listening to contemporary musical forms, in which intervals of the same sound are arranged repetitively. The individual form rhythmises the graphic space, which for Kim Lim becomes a concrete physical experience.

With the numbered series Temple (2000 – 2022), Daiga Grantina turns away from her congealed and floating form complexes to develop a sculpturally more subtle poetics. The artist uses irregular triangles as geometric lenses and structural substrates for her material experiments. Their transparent or opaque qualities give the give the wall works in the series Square Shadows (2024) a layered appearance that increases in depth with the incidence of light and remains changeable. Grantina sees light as an artistic medium that complements her sculptures or becomes a form in itself. The immateriality of light facilitates her search for a destabilising quality in her artistic vocabulary.

CURATORS
Stefanie Gschwend (Direktorin / director Kunstmuseum / Kunstmuseum Appenzell), Daiga Grantina (Künstlerin / artist)

EXHIBITION INSTALLATION
Christian Hörler, Christian Meier, Ueli Alder, Asi Föcker, Vanessà Heer, Flavio Hodel, Luca Tarelli, Regina Brülisauer, Margrit Gmünder, Xiaoping Meier-Chen, Madleina Rutishauser

ORGANISATION
Stefanie Gschwend, Luca Tarelli

ART EDUCATION
Domenika Chandra

MUSEUM ATTENDANTS
Dominique Franke, Margrit Gmünder, Ian Groll, Barbara Metzger, Heneisha Morris, Madleina Rutishauser

CATERING & EVENTS
Regina Brülisauer

EDITOR
TEXT
Stefanie Gschwend, Luca Tarelli

PROOFREADING & TRANSLATION
Stefanie Gschwend

PHOTOS
© Daiga Grantina

GRAPHIC DESIGN
Data-Orbit / Michel Egger, St.Gallen

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Bianca Chu, Katalin Deér, Daiga Grantina, Kim Lim Estate / Turnbull Studio, Mathilde Labuthie, Ilma Rakusa, Leopold Thun, Alex Turnbull, Johnny Turnbull, Angelina Volk, Toan Vu-Huu, Julius Woeste, Anna Zvaradny