Esther Schipper presents Conversations (25 March–10 May 2025), a group exhibition exploring one of the most symbolic colours in the history of art, and how it has been used and represented in the work of significant artists from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 

The exhibition brings together a diverse and international group of artists including Angela Bulloch, Salvo, Niki de Saint Phalle and Sojourner Truth Parsons. Conversations marks the inaugural exhibition at Esther Schipper’s newly opened space in Hannam, launched in Spring 2025.

This was a real discovery for me. I appreciated the carefully chosen pieces, all of which connected with the space and with each other through color, shape, and process. While these artists may appear worlds apart, working in different media, eras, and thematic concerns, they still shared a common thread: a fascination with the interplay between form and emotion.

Salvo was born as Salvatore Mangione in 1947 in Leonforte, Sicily. After moving to Paris and taking part in the student protests, he eventually settled in Turin, where he became associated with the Arte Povera movement through his early experiments in Conceptual art. In 1973, Salvo makes a crucial decision in 1973 to go back to painting, which he will never again abandon. This was unconventional and retro-radical at the time. His paintings are characterized by vivid colors and interplays of light and form, contained within a surreal stillness. Between 1980-1999, he realized a series of landscapes with country homes, churches, and monuments, with vegetation and trees inspired by Giotto.

Angela Bulloch was born in 1966 in Rainy River, Canada and studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths’ College, London. Her multidisciplinary practice explores systems, patterns, and rules, often touching on the history of geometric forms and the ways humans interact with them. She often incorporates music into her art through light instillations, videos that respond to sound. Herself a performer, and record label owner (LBCDLP), Bulloch bridges visual and auditory experiences. More recently, her Stacks, unique structures made of compiled rhomboids, play with light and colour to create optical effects, two of which were on view at Esther Schipper Seoul.

Niki de Saint Phalle is celebrated for her bold, vibrant, and often provocative sculptures, paintings, and installations. A key figure in the Nouveau Réalisme movement, she is best known for her Nana series—large, exuberant, curvaceous female figures that embody joy, strength, and femininity. The two sculptures featured in the exhibition come from this iconic series, which she began in the mid-1960s as her feminist awareness grew and she sought to challenge conventional portrayals of the female body in art.

Sojourner Truth Parsons was born in 1984 in Vancouver, Canada and now lives and works in Brooklyn. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her paintings combine matte, glossy, and iridescent textures, and explore emotional and psychological states through vivid color, symbolic forms, and shifting spatial cues. In the artist’s compositions, flashes of saturated colour, flattened space and familiar motifs come into relation, fraying the border between interior and exterior worlds. Figures, flowers, city blocks, and landscapes appear and dissolve, often anchored by a glowing sun or moon that shifts the reading of the image in an instant. To me, some of Parsons’ works seem to carry a spiritual or tribal resonance, almost like the motif of a garment—perhaps a reflection of her Afro-Indigenous and settler heritage.