Kim Lim

Kim Lim (1936–1997) was born in Singapore and moved to London in 1954 to pursue her artistic training, studying first at St. Martin’s School of Fine Art and later at the Slade. There, she explored printmaking and sculpture with equal enthusiasm—two approaches that formed the basis of her work in the four decades that followed. She drew equally from European modernist artists she admired, including Brancusi and Giacometti, as from the natural, architectural, and artistic forms she encountered on her travels across Asia, North Africa, and Europe. A keen observer of nature and natural forces, in her printmaking, photography and sculptural work, she would echo the sinuous curves of a vast desert plain, the waves of a silent sea breeze, and other experiential moments of life in her work.

Much of Lim’s early work can be characterised by her engagement with materials such as wood and bronze. Works such as “Abacus I” and “Abacus II” (1959), two sister relief sculptures modelled after the ancient Chinese calculation tool, employ a poverty of material and reveal Lim’s ability to transform fundamental shapes and concepts with an elegant gesture. Her series “Intervals”, which references both sculptural and paper works, employs negative space with equal detail as it does with ideas of density and volume. The year 1979 proved to be a watershed moment for the artist, culminating in a mid-career survey show at The Roundhouse, where Lim would exhibit works from every period in a non-linear and non-chronological method, partly in response to the venue itself, a circular gallery space. This was also the year that Lim moved toward an embracing of stone and marble mediums, materials that would remain present in her practice until her untimely passing in 1997. Lim’s work remains an important signifier of not only the British art scene in the post-war period, but evokes the internationalism at that time, as well as the universality and longevity of her artistic concerns.