"Lee Ufan - Versailles" in Versailles

After Giuseppe Penone last year, the guest artist in Versailles for summer and autumn 2014 is Lee Ufan, the painter and sculptor of Korean origin.

The intense and silent works of this artist will be placed in the palace and in the gardens, at the foot of the Gabriel stairs, in the great perspective designed by Le Nôtre and around the corner of walks or in the mysterious groves, completing and modifying the atmosphere for a time.

Born in 1936 in a mountain village in South Korea, Lee Ufan was first initiated to traditional Chinese culture.

Lee Ufan’s sculptures most often confront two materials: steel plates and natural stones.

Their generic name “Relatum”,expresses the notion that a work of art is not an autonomous and independent entity, but that it only exists in its relation to the outside world.

For Lee Ufan, the action of the sculptor consists in criticizing the hyper-productivity of the modern world, in response to the evolution of art, which after thousands of year spent making hand-made objects, moved to industrial objects and ready-made. Lee Ufan has chosen to connect the made and the unmade. In his mind, “seeing, choosing, borrowing or moving are already a part of the creative act”.

In Versailles, the artist will install ten works, all entirely new, some of them of unusual size to correspond to the spaces in the gardens.

Lee Ufan lives in Kamakura in Japan, but he maintains close relationships with France where he has worked for the last twenty years in his Paris atelier. The artist exhibiting in the Versailles gardens is a familiar figure on the French art scene.