Dabin Ahn: Golden Days
Opening Reception:
Saturday, January 17, 6—8PM
François Ghebaly is proud to present Golden Days, Dabin Ahn’s solo exhibition at the gallery’s Los Angeles space.
Painter and sculptor Dabin Ahn transforms personal objects, Korean ceramic vessels, and other ephemeral still-life elements into sites of passage. Drawing from 20th century art history, Joseon dynasty porcelain traditions, and his own imagination, he creates sensitive, meticulously painted scenes that explore remembrance and impermanence. Ahn extends his practice through wooden artist frames that he carves himself, creating apertures along the canvas edge that expose secondary or tertiary images within a single composition and dissolve boundaries between pictorial and sculptural space. Light functions both compositionally and symbolically throughout his work, where pin sources like fireflies or candles—the latter a nod to Gerhard Richter’s seminal series of paintings—appear to illuminate Ahn’s foregrounded subjects from both within and beyond the traditional picture plane.
His newest exhibition, Golden Days, features ten paintings and two sculptures that continue the artist’s evolving dialogue with memory and presence. In many paintings, vessels appear suspended in states of dissolution or reconstitution, accompanied by objects such as eyeglasses, watches, and other seemingly personal effects that conjure a dual sense of presence and absence, becoming and unbecoming. Moths, cranes, and fireflies inhabit many of Ahn’s spaces as if sprung from the illustrations that adorn the glazing of the vessels themselves. In Above and Beyond, one small crane appears ready to fly off the canvas edge as the others, still enjoined to a celadon vase, look on.
Wood becomes a recurring element across the exhibition, not only in the artist's signature sculptural frames but as subject matter itself, its grain rendered with the same trompe l’œuil attention Ahn brings to glass and porcelain surfaces. Though naturalistic in their appearance, Ahn’s still life worlds inhabit a painterly logic that insists upon the presence of apparitions. In works like Soliloquy, Repose, and the title works Golden Days I and II, Ahn places candles on the edges of the work, creating ghostly double reflections on the central vases and glass goblets. Untitled (Dad) shows a paper note and pencil left on a small wooden table, the faint silhouetted neck of a vase hovering phantom-like above the scene.
Set in the exhibition space are two small wooden sculptures, Ephemeral and Ephemeral II. Each features a solitary candle flame painted on a small piece of wooden burl inlaid with turquoise, and suspended by a brass rod. Within the context of the show they take on something of a devotional aspect, lit to honor the ties and memories of the past, and the promise of a new day.
Dabin Ahn (b. 1988, Seoul, Korea) creates paintings populated by flora, fauna, vessels, candles, and ceramic fragments, motifs that function as representations of the self. Ahn’s paintings also incorporate sculptural elements such as hand-built frames that part to reveal images along the canvas edge. Light plays a central role in the artist’s lexicon, suggesting an illuminating presence even when its source is hidden. These elements collectively blur the boundaries between the material and the imagined, evoking an emotional depth reflective of the human experience.
Ahn received a BFA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Selected solo exhibitions include Harper’s, New York; 1969, New York; OCHI, Los Angeles; Shatto Gallery, Los Angeles. Recent group exhibitions include Make Room, Los Angeles; Harper’s, East Hampton; and The Hole, Los Angeles. Ahn lives and works in Chicago.