"I think we're the three people left in the world who knew Mark Rothko."
It was a Monday morning in Seoul, the air fresh after a passing rain, when Arne Glimcher, founder of the global powerhouse Pace Gallery, spoke these words and turned to his right, meeting the eyes of his two companions — Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko, the children of the late American Abstract Expressionist titan.
In the mid-1960s in New York, Glimcher, then a young art dealer in his 20s, became friends with the aging Mark Rothko, whose East 69th Street studio was just across the street from his apartment. The gallerist fondly recalled how he would often knock on the door of Rothko's lit studio and be welcomed inside every time.
"He would show me his new works, and we would talk. He was very generous with his conversation," Glimcher told The Korea Times.
Their thoughtful friendship was cut short in 1970 when the painter, whose immense color-soaked rectangles have mesmerized millions, ended his life.
Yet that moment was what also heralded the beginning of Glimcher's bond with Kate and Christopher Rothko, who were just 19 and 6 years old at the time of their father's death.
In fact, after years of notorious legal battles in the 1970s between Rothko's children and the original executors of his estate — who were ultimately found guilty of defrauding the family and conspiring to sell Rothko's works at deflated prices — Pace Gallery was named the new representative of the artist's estate in 1978.
Since then, the gallery has organized a dozen Rothko exhibitions, many of which, in Glimcher's words, were like "peeling an onion" to reveal new layers of the artist.
"Most of the great Abstract Expressionists, you know them for one image — usually their last works or close to their last works. Rothko is a much more complex artist than that. He plays off of himself from period to period until he builds to this astonishing crescendo," the gallerist observed, noting Rothko's evolution from early realist paintings to Surrealist abstractions and finally to his misty fields of color.
The latest headline-grabbing exhibition in Seoul casts the 20th-century icon's masterpieces in yet another new light — this time, by placing them in a dialogue with Korean artist Lee Ufan's minimalist color brushworks.
"Correspondence" is a show curated by Lee himself in collaboration with the Rothko family, with each of Pace Gallery Seoul's floor dedicated to one of the artists — the second floor featuring Rothko's major works from the 1950s and '60s and the third showcasing Lee's "Dialogue" and "Response" series from 2018 to 2023.
"Marc Glimcher [Pace Gallery CEO and Arne's son] reached out to me less than a year ago and said that, in conjunction with Frieze, he wanted to do a spectacular show here. And he asked what I thought about bringing Rothko to Seoul," recalled Christopher Rothko, who, along with his sister Kate, serves as a custodian of their father's legacy.
He found the proposal appealing, but needed to understand the show's context. That was when he learned of the possibility of placing Mark Rothko's abstractions in conversation with Lee's.
"Just a few months before that, I had been at the Dallas Museum of Art to see two Rothkos showing there. And in the next gallery was a gallery of 20th-century Korean paintings. There were three large-scale canvases from the 1950s and '60s by Lee Ufan, and I was just transfixed," he added. "So when Marc mentioned this idea, it immediately connected with me. I called my sister, and here we are."
The two gave Lee the freedom to select works from the family collection so that the artist could curate a show that felt cohesive and authentic to his vision.
The result is a stunning dialogue that reveals unexpected intersections of color and atmosphere resonating across the paintings of both masters.
—Park Han-sol
