Byron Kim: Sunday Paintings

Starting in 2001, Byron Kim engaged in a project to make a single painting every week. In his ongoing series titled Sunday Paintings, Kim has looked upward and painted a patch of sky on a 14x14 inch canvas, inscribing a short journalistic entry in pen or pencil, and marking the specific place and time.
- BYRON KIM, Sunday Painting (5/01/2022), 2022
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Installation view, Byron Kim, Sunday Paintings, 1/7/01 – 2/11/18, James Cohan, January 5 – February 17, 2018. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, NY.
Byron Kim’s paintings occupy a territory between representation and abstraction. Using the human body, human culture, or the natural world as his primary source material, Kim creates perceptive, subtle and poetic works. Duration and seriality are an important aspect to many of Kim’s works, and his Sunday Paintings are the longest and most personal attempt at a lifelong project.
- BYRON KIM, Sunday Painting (10/25/21), 2021
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- BYRON KIM, Sunday Painting (10/31/21), 2021
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Installation view of Byron Kim: The Sunday Paintings at moCa Cleveland, September 13, 2019 – January 5, 2020. Photo by Field Studio.
My work has mostly been concerned with the relationship of a part to the whole. How am I connected to the others in the world, and how are we all connected to the greater whole? – Byron Kim
- BYRON KIM, Sunday Painting 4/19/20, 2020
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Kim often spends years grappling with a concept, such as his well-known serial portrait Synecdoche. In this project, which was the hallmark of the 1993 Whitney Biennial, Kim paints groups of small, monochrome panels that replicate the skin tone of his sundry sitters.
Installation view of Byron Kim, Sunday Painting, 2020－2021 at the Aichi Triennale 2022, July 30 – October 10, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan. ©︎ Aichi Triennale Organizing Committee. Photo: ToLoLo studio
The Sunday Paintings are decidedly uniform in many ways, yet individually, Kim creates the singular “portrait” of a day by capturing wispy clouds, vibrant blues, or dreary greys. Kim’s words are intentionally observational – even mundane – in their content, but these phrases keenly express the ordinariness and changeability of everyday life.
On January 21, 2007, Kim records;

Finally, it’s cold. I’m so stressed out today. Little Things. Ella’s midterms. Addee’s boredom. The crates I need to receive tomorrow.
For viewers, the context of the painting can be elusive or strikingly memorable and the expansive subject matter is at times both intimately personal and universal. Considered in its totality, the Sunday Paintings series becomes the ongoing record of a life.
Installation view of Byron Kim: The Sunday Paintings at moCa Cleveland, September 13, 2019 – January 5, 2020. Photo by Field Studio
About the Artist

Byron Kim, born in 1961, is a Senior Critic at Yale University and a Co-director at Yale Norfolk School of Art. He received a BA from Yale University in 1983 and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1986. Among Kim’s numerous awards are the Louise Nevelson Award in Art, American Academy of Arts and Letters, NY (1993), the New York Foundation for the Arts Grant and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1994), the National Endowment of the Arts Award (1995), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (1997), the Alpert Award in the Arts (2008), the Guggenheim Fellowship (2017), the Robert de Niro, Sr., Prize (2019) and the Skowhegan Medal for Painting (2022). His works are in the permanent collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.; the M+ Museum, Hong Kong; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, CA; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Pérez Art Museum, Miami; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; the Tate Modern, London, UK; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and the the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. Byron Kim lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and San Diego, CA. LEARN MORE→