Join us in San Francisco for the gallery’s inaugural participation in FOG Art + Design

FOG Art + Design
FOG Focus Booth 507

Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture
2 Marina Boulevard
San Francisco, CA 94123

Preview Gala
January 21, 4 – 10PM

Hours
January 22, 11AM – 7PM
January 23, 11AM – 7PM
January 24, 11AM – 7PM
January 25, 11AM – 5PM

Get FOG tickets here.

Marta is pleased to announce the gallery’s inaugural participation at FOG Design + Art in San Francisco with a presentation of work by New York-based artists Minjae Kim and Dominik Tarabański. Located within Pier 2 of the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, FOG Focus Booth 507, this coexistence of work, drawn together as compositions of lighting, seating, tabling, and photography, considers the artists’ shared gestures within disparate mediums—of the balancing act performed by the twin actors of material tension and formal calculation.

With studios located on opposing floors of the Grand Morgan Building in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, Kim and Tarabański have translated a microcosm of their universe to the West Coast, closing the gap between their sites of making: land and sky. Situated below street level, Kim, working in wood, resin, fiberglass, and metal, fabricates his ideas within a chapel-like space—solid walls, high ceilings, and transom windows that hint at the outside world without imposing its will. Ascending to Tarabańskii’s fourth-floor studio, located on the building’s highest storey, that will is a governing principle. With a windowed roof and curtained walls, light and movement redefine the photographer’s atelier throughout the day as the sun arcs across the firmament.

As the two artists travel between their realms on any given day, in dialogue as friends, collaborators, and fellow artists-with-visas, their work takes on a relational logic that grounds the concrete in the abstract, the solid in the ephemeral. Within Kim’s sculptural-functional designs, form and material works with and against itself, offering unlikely angles, curvatures, and textures that resolve themselves in a singular geometry. Sharp edges of aluminum soften beneath the weightless covering of a paper shade, waves of quilted fiberglass harden in resin, their ripples eternal—lit from within or structured for our repose. His decisions appear intuitive, reactive to what is literally in hand rather than prescribed by the virtue of symmetry for symmetry’s sake.

Tarabański shares this ground with Kim, his photographic compositions deriving from temporal gestures that collapse or decay after they are captured. Each of the artist’s archival pigment prints draws our attention to the elegance of tenuousness, offering permanence to the moment before a snap, break, or fall—of the quiet swell toward action without the release. His tableaus, like those of Dutch still life paintings and Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, are both abundant and restrained—their organization paramount to the suspension that belies their inevitable demise. Set against rich fabric backdrops, Tarabański’s constructions of flowers, tailor’s pins, twine, and fruit netting exist at an indiscernible distance, their foreground and background merging into a single vast color field.

There is a reciprocity between Kim and Tarabański, each offering an invitation to access the other through the composition of discrete works that reinforce a mutual legibility; an implicit collaboration. Reaching across the plane, we find them to be as above, so below.

Minjae Kim lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. An alumnus of the Architecture program at Columbia University, in 2018 Kim began complementing his interest in the built environment with works built from hand. Kim’s dovetailing sculpture and furniture practices persuade through functionality both suggested and actual. From his predictive bodily impressions in wood to the silhouettes of his quilted fiberglass hulls and vessels, Kim insists on the invitation to actuate form and produce generative artistic meaning through materiality and touch. The artist’s inaugural solo exhibition, I Was Evening All Afternoon, was held at Marta in 2021, and Kim has since gone on to present work with Etage Projects, Nina Johnson, Blunk Space, and Salon 94 among others. His sprawling follow-up solo exhibition, Phantom–22, was presented at Marta earlier this year. He has been recognized in a cadre of publications, including Apartmento, Architectural Digest, Cultured, Financial Times, MilK, The New York Times, Office, Pin–Up, Surface, and Wallpaper*

Dominik Tarabański lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His work explores the tension between impermanence and control, often blending sculptural elements with photographic composition. He has exhibited work in Warsaw at the 6×7 Gallery, the gallery at the National Philharmonic Hall in Szczecin, and the Zitadelle Spandau Centre for Contemporary Art in Berlin. He has guest lectured at the Polish National Film School in Łódz and the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and taught at the Academy of Photography in Kraków. He graduated with degrees in Photography from the Department of Cinematography at the Polish National Film School (Łódz) and from the Academy of Photography (Warsaw). Tarabański’s images are part of private collections in New York, Paris, Berlin, Hong Kong, London, Brussels, Arles, Warsaw, and Tokyo.