Illumination at Frieze House Seoul

Clubhouse Gallery will present Illumination, its first exhibition in Korea, at Frieze House Seoul from October 15 through November 6, 2026. The exhibition features a tightly focused selection of recent works by Alicia Adamerovich, Caleb Hahne Quintana, Piper Bangs, and Julia Jo.

Light has been one of painting’s essential subjects and tools for centuries. Renaissance and Baroque artists used chiaroscuro to give bodies volume and drama; Impressionists studied its changing effects; and modern painters used color itself to create luminosity and alter perception. Illumination brings together four contemporary approaches to reexamining what light makes visible and how it changes the psychological experience of an image. 

Works by Alicia Adamerovich move from heavily textured, biomorphic painted surfaces to delicate renderings in pastel. Across this selection, abstracted forms hover between landscapes and objects. Their looping contours and carefully rendered surfaces give them an almost animate presence, as though they possess moods, gestures and personalities of their own, while remaining inanimate forms. Dark cavities, mineral-like surfaces and sudden passages of color make the images feel illuminated from within. Throughout her practice, Adamerovich proposes the painted world as a terrain of the subconscious, treating light as an atmosphere capable of materializing an inner cognitive state. 

Piper Bangs gives still-life subjects such as fruit and botanical forms the status of figures. In her works, fleshy forms move between the wild and the domestic, arranged in ways that suggest closeness, awkwardness, comfort and ambivalence without settling into a single story. Drawing on the illusionistic light and material richness found in historical oil painting, Bangs uses contrasting thickness and shadow to make these forms feel psychologically alive, showing how light can transform familiar objects into emotionally charged presences.

Julia Jo uses a vibrant color palette and sweeping calligraphic marks to move between gestural abstraction and the suggestion of figuration. In both large canvases and intimately scaled works, dense fields of shifting color and dynamic brushwork produce fleeting contours as each layer of paint obscures and reconstitutes the image. In her practice, line, color and shadow simultaneously reveal and conceal, making illumination a shifting perceptual encounter rather than a static source of light.

Caleb Hahne Quintana’s visual world reveals itself through a painting of two boys caught in a physical encounter that represent two versions of the artist’s inner self – one lighter-haired and one darker-haired – locked in a struggle that makes self-division visible. Their contrast gives the painting a visual language of light and dark, but their opposition is psychological rather than moral, with tenderness and defense, vulnerability and strength occupying the same image. Quintana carries similar tension into his equestrian paintings, where black-and-white contrasts give the horse a heightened, almost mythic presence. Together, these works show how light and shadow operate as both formal contrasts and psychological forces, bringing questions of memory, masculinity and inner conflict into view without resolving them. 

Across these four practices, illumination emerges through gradation and contrast as much as through a depicted source of light. It shapes not only what appears in an image, but also how forms are perceived, felt and remembered. Figures, objects and abstract forms move between familiarity and ambiguity; gestures and contours emerge and dissolve; and light gives each work its own emotional atmosphere. Illumination asks viewers to look slowly and consider how perception changes with time, memory, desire and distance.

Illumination will be presented at Frieze House Seoul, Frieze House Seoul is Frieze’s permanent exhibition space in Seoul, South Korea. Situated in a former private residence in the Yaksu-dong neighborhood, it serves as a platform for global and local art scenes to connect through a year-round program of exhibitions and events.

Opening Receiption:
Thursday, October 15th 5-8PM  (RSVP kindly requested)

Vistation Informatoin:

Frieze House Seoul
17 Dongho-ro 15-gil, Jung-gu
Seoul 04598, South Korea
Tuesday to Saturday, 11am–6pm
Free entry; no reservation required
Frieze House Seoul Website