Daiga Grantina: Notes on Kim Lim

The exhibition Daiga Grantina: Notes on Kim Lim traces the work of the Singaporean-British artist Kim Lim (1936–97, Singapore, lived and worked in London, UK) in a contemporary and associative exploration, placing her oeuvre in dialogue with the sculptures of the Latvian artist Daiga Grantina (b. 1985, Saldus, Latvia lives and works in Paris, France). There are striking similarities and parallels between the works, 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.

Kim Lim 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, as well as her engagement with the correlation between art and nature. 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 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. She draws inspiration for the development of her material processes from the numerous adaptive properties of biological life, such as coexistence and self-replication and sees her works as mediators between earthly and cosmic spaces that require an elasticity of our imagination and feeling.

Versatility and elasticity are characteristic and constitutive of the artistic practices of Kim Lim and Daiga Grantina. 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. 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. 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. 

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 (b. 1965, Palo Alto, California, USA, lives and works in St. Gallen, CH) and the poet Ilma Rakusa (b. 1946, Rimavská Sobota, Czechoslovakia, lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland). 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 (b. 1977, Szczecin, Poland, lives and works in Warsaw, Poland) will contribute her sonic “note” to the exhibition.

Curated by Daiga Grantina and Stefanie Gschwend.

Press requests
Luca Tarelli (Tuesday–Thursday): ltarelli [​at​] kunstmuseumappenzell.ch

Opening: Saturday, October 19
3:30pm: Notes on Kim Lim—A Conversation (English). Alex and Johnny Turnbull with Bianca Chu from the Estates of Artists William Turnbull and Kim Lim. / from 6pm: Opening reception and DJ.