Chronomatic Echoes
Sehee Kim
GALLERY I
Sehee Kim, On the Edge (detail), 2024-2025, oil on canvas, 80 x 410 inches.
August 9–September 7, 2025
Opening reception: Saturday, August 9 from 6–8pm
A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce Chronomatic Echoes, an exhibition by artist Sehee Kim. Kim presents a series of paintings that begin with embodied gestures and are refined through careful, deliberate coloring, tracing the dialogue between body, emotion, and material. This is Kim’s first solo exhibition in New York City.
Coined from the words chronos (time) and chromatic (color), “Chronomatic” describes how time dissolves into color, and how color gathers the echoes of time. Time is embedded in two stages: first, through embodied gestures that form the compositional understructure, and second, through the painstaking process of infilling those marks with precise, deliberate color. Surfaces accumulate over hours, days, and months—revealing time not as something that passes, but something to be physically held, layered, and preserved.
Two bodies of work are presented: a selection of paintings created between 2017 and 2019, and On the Edge, a recently completed expansive installation painting.
In the earlier works, paint is dripped from a controlled height onto canvases laid on the floor, the concentric mark-making suggesting an omniscient point of view. Physical distance between the body and the canvas mirrors an emotional one, as Kim represents despair from a third-person perspective. Each mark is a trace of movement, and yet never spontaneous. By contrast, On the Edge (2024–2025) embodies the emotion on a microscopic scale. Diluted marks along the vertical axis represent a more ambivalent emotional topography, as the artist accepts her inability to control how the paint will stain and settle on the surface, relinquishing control. Mirrored images and complementary colors painted around the contours invoke a chromatic rhythm, weaving a linear experience of time through subtle gradation. The harmony of the overall elements results in an immersive panorama spanning over thirty-three feet.
The exhibition maps a dialogue between emotional memory and presence, movement and stillness, vulnerability and permanence. Kim invites viewers to place themselves inside time. As colors accumulate and linger on the canvases, the space itself begins to quietly pulse—creating a chronomatic experience that echoes.
Sehee Kim received her MFA from Stony Brook University and BA from Hunter College. Solo exhibitions include Chronomatic Echoes at A.I.R. Gallery, In Between (2024), Not What You Think (2022), and Horizon Series: Light and Beyond (2022) at Stony Brook University. She received Howardena Pindell Excellence Award (2024) and Kusama Art Award (2023). She lives and works in Queens, NY. seheekimstudio.com
View the Press Release here.