Harper’s is pleased to announce Departure Before Arrival, New York-based artist Calvin Kim’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The presentation features new oil paintings by Kim and opens April 30, 6–8pm, with a reception attended by the artist.
Throughout Departure Before Arrival, Kim directs his gaze towards transitional terrains. The beaming works that comprise this exhibition illuminate ephemeral scenes—imagined landscapes at the threshold of subtle transformation. The artist constructs worlds charged with tension like one would in a poem, through expressive arrangements of fragmented imagery. Together, Kim’s paintings arouse curiosity for dreamscapes: Departure Before Arrival beckons horizons, sightlines, and gathering points just beyond the margins of viewership.
In works like Keeping, Kim suspends the viewer between two hulking thumbs. Bathed in searing red, these two grand hands greet like tectonic plates nearing collision. A fragile yellow flower buds between the fingertips; from this point of near-contact, thin roots dangle, suggesting a site of origin while displacing the viewer in a field of uncertainty. Above, pillowy clouds drift aimlessly amidst the crimson sky, ascending the viewer to a state of wonder. Gesture is generative in this intimate work: tender, unstable, and ripe with the possibility of becoming.
Kim’s eye for temporality extends to works like Dreaming of flight. Here, Kim invokes the feeling of flight across a landscape reminiscent of the view from a plane. A winged silhouette sails across a green and purple flatland. These roving pastures are dotted with itinerant pastel marks that recall city lights—signs of distant life—as well as a snail’s shell and plucked daisy, seemingly caught in the scene’s cosmic torrent. The artist’s palette is more subtle here: he opts for muted tones that melt together in frenetic strokes across this visual plane, as if piecing together a fuzzy memory from yesteryear.
What do you remember of the future? is similarly surreal. Veiled in cascading haze, this painting conjures the fleeting presence of memory across haunting segments. Mask-like shadows loom like abandoned monoliths, framing wispy stick figures that seem to flicker in and out of time. The blushing sky, radiating a distant sun, invokes the quiet ache of nostalgia, while the lush, dappled foreground brims with movement and the residue of tense emotion. Brilliant blue flora blossoms near the edge of the composition creating a burst of visual clarity in the esoteric scene.
Like many of the works throughout Departure Before Arrival, What do you remember of the future? suffuses a mood of longing. Kim invites the viewer to peer into a dream that has already begun to fade. What remains is never a complete image, but its temporal afterglow—glimpses of environments aching with feeling. Together, the works in Departure Before Arrival repeatedly linger along the tenuous border between presence and disappearance, like a thought or query caught mid-exhale. The artist renders this impermanence with quiet intensity, blurring form and color until they dissolve into one another. It’s this world of ambiguity that the viewer inhabits throughout Departure Before Arrival.
Calvin Kim (b. 1992, Los Angeles, CA) received an MFA from Columbia University in 2023, and a combined BFA/BA from Cornell University in 2015; in addition, Kim attended programs at Oxbow School of Art in 2015 and Yale Norfolk School of Art in 2014. His work has been the subject of solo presentations at SITUATIONS, New York (2024); Future Fair, New York (2024); and POWDERFREEVACUUMSEALED, online (2020). Most recently, Kim has participated in group exhibitions at Harper’s, New York (2024); DeKalb Gallery, New York (2024); Chilli Arts Project, London (2024); Joyce Goldstein Gallery, Chatham, NY (2023); LaiSun Keane, Boston (2023); and Charles Moffett, New York (2023). Reviews of his work have appeared in publications, including Boston Art Review, Korea Times, and New American Paintings. Kim lives and works in New York City, where he has been an artist-in-residence at Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts since 2023.