Highlights of Modern Painting: Portraits of an Era

From September 15, 2026 to January 9, 2027, Global Sae-A Art Space holds new exhibition Highlights of Modern Painting: Portraits of an Era. This exhibition traces the major currents of international contemporary art from Surrealism through Abstraction to Postmodernism, exploring the unique "portrait of an era" that art has captured along the way. It brings together twenty major works by fourteen artists who represent the key currents of international contemporary art from the early twentieth century to the present day.

The exhibition is organized into three parts.
The first part, A Walk Through Dreams, presents works in a Surrealist vein by Paul Delvaux (1897–1994) and Marc Chagall (1887–1985). Both artists offer a dreamlike world discovered amid the devastation of war, turning toward something more fundamental — one that explores the depths of the human unconscious and the realm of dreams.

The second part, Enigmatic Abstraction, introduces works by Willem de Kooning (1904–1997), Yayoi Kusama (1929–2026), Lynne Drexler (1928–1999), Marina Perez Simão (1980–), and Peter Halley (1953–). Through distinct visual languages — color, line, plane, repeating pattern, and geometric structure — these artists illuminate the legacy of Modernist abstraction and its many contemporary variations.

The third and final part, The Return of the Figure, brings together works by David Hockney (1937–2026), Salvo (1947–2015), Nicolas Party (1980–), Hilary Pecis (1979–), Jonathan Gardner (1982–), Adrian Ghenie (1977–), George Condo (1957–), and Yayoi Kusama, introduced in the previous section. Each of these artists reinterprets the movements of the past in their own way, restoring the concrete figures to the canvas and offering, through their own small and personal narratives, a portrait of their time.


Independet curator Park Mihwa — formerly a senior curator at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea — brings her thoughtful eye not only to the visual qualities of each work, but to the era in which it was created and the personal and social circumstances that shaped each artist's practice. 

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