This autumn in London, Lisson is honoured to present an exhibition of one of the world’s foremost abstract painters, Ha Chong-Hyun, surveying his experimentation and mastery over the past six decades of pioneering work. Based in Seoul, Ha (born in 1935) has gained international recognition for combining elements of monochromatic, minimalist and gestural abstraction with conceptual, performative and material aspects of painting.

The display includes key early works, including a folded and rippled canvas dating back to the late 1960s. His first innovations in abstraction signify his nascent positioning of painting firmly within the realm of objecthood – exploring it three-dimensionally and in the round – although he never claimed them as sculptural in intent, preferring to simply question where the painting’s surfaces and supports might really begin and end. Further pushing the possibilities of material and action within the now contested field of painting, Ha began burning his impasto surfaces and adding coiled springs or barbed wire directly to works made in the 1970s, reflecting South Korea’s protracted periods of martial law and military dictatorship, as well as the paucity of materials available to artists at the time.