ABOUT
Light settles and flows across smooth surfaces. A faint ridge rises gently, inviting touch and stillness. What appears at first glance to be calm and understated gradually reveals itself as a field of sensory depth formed by the movement of the viewer’s gaze. Lies Kraal’s works go beyond simple color and form—they unfold as ongoing experiences that are revealed through the passage of time.
Baik Art is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Lies Kraal, whose contemplative practice explores the depth of color and surface through a language of minimal form and subtle texture. Marking her first solo exhibition in Korea in eight years, the exhibition surveys the artist’s works from the 2000s onward, encompassing paintings and prints organized into four distinct sections. The exhibition offers a multisensory experience: visitors can listen to the music that inspired the artist, or engage with a puzzle created by Kraal, extending her minimalist aesthetic into tactile and sonic dimensions. The works do not seek to direct interpretation but instead open space for sensation. Through this approach, Kraal crafts a world of quiet, and sensorial depth.
Since 1988, Lies Kraal has been practicing Zen Buddhism which has shaped both her life and art practice. For Kraal, Zen is not a belief system but a way of being: an openness to the present and a search for centeredness. Her process—repeatedly layering and sanding paint—is less a ritual of labor than an inquiry into how color and surface evolve. This sensibility resonates with Zen’s fundamental notion of “seeing things as they are.”
“It became more minimal, more minimal, more minimal because I really wanted to do more with less.”
In her own words, Kraal’s paintings have grown increasingly reductive over time, paring away the unnecessary and focusing on the essential. The repeated application and removal of pigment creates surfaces that are not merely accumulations of color, but investigations into how color is absorbed, reflected, and perceived. Matte and glossy finishes, subtle ridges, and tonal shifts give each work a sensorial complexity, subtly transforming with light, space, and the viewer’s position. Kraal leaves her work open to perception, allowing each viewer to experience its quiet interplay of color and surface at their own pace. The use of the square —neutral and non-directional—reinforces a philosophy of balance and restraint. Likewise, her works are titled only with numbers and dates, granting viewers the freedom to interpret. In doing so, Kraal gently shifts the role of the viewer from passive observer to active participant, inviting each person to complete the work through their own rhythm of attention and experience.
The exhibition unfolds across four main bodies of work: single-color paintings with ridged surfaces; burnished azurite works on paper with raised geometric grids; The Women’s Jazz Singer Series; and the Le Taquin prints developed in collaboration with master printmaker Robert Arber. Kraal finds subtle variations in repeated acts, echoing her belief that even the same flower, tree, or stone appears differently with the change of season or time of day. Her works often absorb impressions from her travels —such as work 01-17, made using a powder collected while traveling in Nepal, or 04-5, using the red tika powder Indian women use on their foreheads.Theazurite works on paper merge steady repetition with organic variation, producing a visual rhythm. Meanwhile, the Women Jazz Singers includes faint traces of musical staff lines scored across the paper. They can be experienced alongside the music that inspired them. In the Le Taquin print series—named after a type of puzzle—Kraal translates her structural interests into interactive form. The artist made puzzle is presented in the exhibition space, allowing visitors to engage directly with her process of minimal construction and spatial balance.
This exhibition proposes a moment of quiet stillness—a space to pause and engage with the work not through explanation, but through sensation. Rather than delivering a fixed message, Kraal invites viewers to gently trace the surfaces with their eyes and attune themselves to the subtle resonance within. “I like people to feel my paintings without touching them.” Kraal says, offering a poetic warning. As art critic David Pagel has noted, the ridges on her paintings act as “speed bumps for the viewer’s eyes,” slowing down perception and inviting sustained attention. Through this gesture, the exhibition becomes not only a visual encounter, but also a quiet punctuation in time—an invitation to pause, reflect, and reconnect with the present moment through the refined language of color, surface, and stillness.