Clubhouse Gallery Presents Illumination at Frieze House Seoul

Clubhouse Gallery presents Illumination at Frieze House Seoul from 15 October to 6 November 2026. The exhibition brings together recent works by Alicia Adamerovich, Piper Bangs, Julia Jo, and Caleb Hahne Quintana. Marking Clubhouse Gallery’s first exhibition in Korea, Illumination brings together four artists working in and around New York to explore light as a formal element and psychological force in contemporary painting.

Light has been one of painting’s most enduring subjects and tools.

Renaissance and Baroque painters used chiaroscuro to give bodies volume and drama; Impressionists studied light’s changing effects; modern painters used color itself to create luminosity and alter perception. Illumination brings these histories into the present, considering what light makes visible and how it changes the psychological experience of an image.

Alicia Adamerovich’s work moves between heavily textured, biomorphic paintings and delicate pastel renderings. Her abstracted forms hover between landscapes and objects: looping contours, dark cavities, mineral-like surfaces, and sudden passages of color give them an almost animate presence while they remain inanimate forms. Light becomes an atmosphere through which an inner cognitive state takes shape. Adamerovich’s first solo museum exhibition, Conundrums, opened at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art in 2026. Her work is held in collections including ICA Miami, He Art Museum, and X Museum.

Piper Bangs gives fruit and botanical forms the status of figures. Drawing on the illusionistic light and material richness of historical oil painting, she uses contrasts in thickness and shadow to make familiar subjects emotionally charged. Her arrangements suggest closeness, awkwardness, comfort, or ambivalence without settling into a single story. Bangs was included in Floating World: Bed, Bath, Bus at Sehwa Museum of Art in Seoul in 2025, and her work is held in the collections of the Denver Art Museum and Sehwa Museum of Art.

Julia Jo uses a vibrant palette and sweeping calligraphic marks to move between gestural abstraction and the suggestion of figuration. In large canvases and intimate works, shifting color and dynamic brushwork produce fleeting contours as each layer obscures and reconstitutes the image. Line, color, and shadow both reveal and conceal, turning illumination into a shifting perceptual encounter. Born in Seoul and based in New York, Jo was featured in the Maier Museum of Art’s 2025–26 exhibition The Audacity of Paint. Her paintings are held in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art, ICA Miami, and Smith College Museum of Art.

Caleb Hahne Quintana’s painting of two boys caught in a physical encounter represents two versions of the artist’s inner self—one lighter-haired, one darker-haired. Their contrast is psychological rather than moral, holding tenderness and defense, vulnerability and strength within the same image. Quintana carries a related tension into his equestrian paintings, where black-and-white contrasts give the horse a heightened, almost mythic presence. His work has been exhibited at the Denver Art Museum, ICA Miami, and Norton Museum of Art, and is held in collections including the Denver Art Museum, High Museum of Art, ICA Miami, and X Museum.

Across these four practices, illumination emerges through gradation and contrast as much as through a depicted source of light. Figures, objects, and abstract forms move between familiarity and ambiguity; contours and gestures emerge and dissolve. The exhibition invites viewers to look slowly and consider how perception changes with time, memory, desire, and distance.

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

VISIT

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