Opening
Saturday, April 19
5 – 8PM

On View
April 19 – May 31 2025

Wednesday – Saturday
Noon – 5PM

Marta
3021 Rowena Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90039

Marta is pleased to announce Phantom–22, the gallery’s long-awaited second solo presentation of work by Korean-born, New York-based artist Minjae Kim. Named for P-22, the mountain lion who famously resided in Griffith Park from 2012 until his death in 2022, the exhibition’s title makes reference to the spectres of the city—to the passage of creatures, ideas, and topographies that define Los Angeles as it continues its constant shift between fantasy and reality, eternal within that splendid rift.

Following the lauded I Was Evening All Afternoon (2021), the artist’s first solo outing with Marta, Phantom–22 is Kim’s largest and most ambitious presentation to date. Taking as its initial starting point the seminal silent film One Week (Buster Keaton, 1920), the exhibition embraces its source material’s traditions of practical effects and set-building through the fabrication of small-scale architectural follies and attendant scenography within the gallery’s double-height envelope. Realized in wood, paint, clay, plaster, aluminum, and fiberglass, the generous cadre of works that comprise Phantom–22 rest comfortably and generously in the four-part Venn diagram of sculpture, set decoration, production design, and prop-making. In part and whole, they conjure up a bricolage love-letter to Keaton’s then-nascent Los Angeles: fiberglass palm fronds, vaguely-anthropomorphic building façades, mock automobiles, and bygone watering holes merge in an installation that invites discovery and places a surreal lens on familiar and unfamiliar regional tropes.

Los Angeles is a city that, by virtue of its geography, can have a distancing effect on its inhabitants. Individual neighborhoods are vibrant and highly communal, but are often felt to be separate from those even in the most direct proximity. In essence, we drive by in order to get to. Here, Kim has offered us a venue to confront that conundrum—to escape the catch-22 (another of the show’s titular inspirations) of the city and rejoice, perhaps even imbibe, in the setting that he has crafted for our habitation.

Plaster mountain lions and other fauna prowl the borders of the exhibition, patrolling their territory with low-slung ease, while diminutive clay figures populate the space in mid-conversation, -thought, and -repose—a reflection of the unique co-existence between humans and wildlife that characterizes Los Angeles. Visitors may choose any number of seats to perch on or settle into: the three barstools with their velveteen upholstery, complete with an accommodating footrest and gear-shift-like handle with which the work can be maneuvered around the floor, or the four chairs-with-slings, the canvas backings of which present as suited silhouettes not unlike the personage of Keaton himself, who spends the entirety of One Week in various states of suited dress. These references to Kim’s initial source material remind us of other subtle allusions to the silent film, the plot of which revolves around a pair of newly-weds attempting to construct a build-it-yourself home, where everything that could go wrong, does. Tall fiberglass panels that emulate the form and patterning of clapboard siding are used to construct the façade of the exhibition’s salo(o)n, while the broad face of the wood and fiberglass room divider presents as a window that can either block out or illuminate the surrounding world.

Within Kim’s fantastic universe, whether seated or standing, drink in hand or with sober vision, we are invited to consider the impossible convergence that exists between our ideals and the reality that surrounds them.

Minjae Kim (b. 1989, Seoul) lives and works in Ridgewood, Queens. 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. He has been recognized in a cadre of publications, including Apartamento, Architectural Digest, Cultured, Financial Times, MilK, The New York Times, Office, Pin–Up, Surface, and Wallpaper*