STANDING PINE

STANDING PINE is pleased to present a group exhibition featuring works by Lee Ufan, Claude Viallat and Gianfranco Zappettini, opening on Saturday, 23 May 2026.

From the 1960s through the 1970s, avant-garde art entered a period of profound transformation, as diverse artistic movements gained momentum across different regions. Within this context, from the 1960s onwards, a tendency emerged to look beyond the artwork understood solely as a completed image or form, and instead to focus on the very elements that constitute it: material, support, surface, gesture, perception and space. Taking as their point of departure the critical awareness that emerged during this period, the three artists presented in this exhibition — Lee Ufan, Claude Viallat and Gianfranco Zappettini — each engaged with this line of inquiry through their own distinctive methods, developing singular conceptions of the artwork and modes of expression within distinct cultural and geographical contexts.

Lee Ufan, one of the leading figures of Mono-ha, was deeply involved in the movement’s theoretical formation. Working across painting, sculpture and writing, he has continued to question the relationships between things and space, bodily action, perception and the world. In Correspondence, presented in this exhibition, traces of pigment are placed upon a pictorial field suffused with resonant emptiness, quietly bringing into relief the relationships between the act of painting, the pictorial plane and the surrounding space.

Claude Viallat, a central figure of Supports/Surfaces, has called into question the conventions of painting founded on the stretcher, canvas and paint, as well as the institutional frameworks surrounding painting itself. Through his repeated motifs painted on supports such as tent canvas and fabric, Viallat opens up painting not as the representation of an image, but as a set of relationships between colour, material, surface and space. Freed from the confinements of the stretcher and its predetermined rectangular canvas, his surfaces appear not as planes confined to the wall, but as presences extending into space.

Working within the context of Pittura Analitica (Analytical Painting), Gianfranco Zappettini has pursued the relationship between the structure of the pictorial plane, thought and the process of making. In his Tele Sovrapposte series, multiple canvases marked with repeated strokes of 2B graphite are layered to explore the visible and the invisible, presence and absence, and the relationship between what appears on the surface and the structure that lies behind it. The partially concealed layers continue to exert a visual influence on one another, quietly bringing into relief the materiality of painting and the process of perception.

In this exhibition, works by three artists of the same generation — who, while active in different contexts, each developed a distinctive practice rooted in a shared field of inquiry — come together within a single space. We warmly invite you to experience the quiet resonances and subtle differences that unfold between them.

Date: Saturday, 23 May – Saturday, 20 June 2026 
Hours: 12:00 – 18:00 (From Tuesday to Saturday) 
Closed on Sundays, Mondays, and national holidays 
Opening reception: Saturday, 23 May, 17:00 – 19:00

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Artist Biographies

Lee Ufan
Born in 1936 in South Gyeongsang Province, Korea. In 1956, Lee moved to Japan, graduating from Nihon University, Department of Philosophy, Tokyo, in 1961. From the late 1960s, he began presenting sculptural works using materials such as stone, steel plate and glass, and through his critical writings became deeply involved in the formation of Mono-ha. From the 1970s onwards, he developed a number of painting series, including From Point, From Line, Correspondence and Dialogue. Through minimal acts of intervention, he has continued to explore the relationships between things, space, emptiness, the body and the viewer. He currently lives and works between Japan and France.

Selected major exhibitions and presentations include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Château de Versailles, Versailles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Dia Beacon, New York; Centre Pompidou-Metz, Metz; The National Art Centre, Tokyo; and Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Kobe. His work is

held in major public collections including the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; The National Museum of Art, Osaka; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; M+, Hong Kong; and the Lee Ufan Museum, Naoshima.

Lee Ufan, Correspondence, 1994, Oil on canvas, 227.3×181.8cm

Claude Viallat
Born in 1936 in Nîmes, France, where he continues to live and work. From the mid- 1960s, Viallat began using unstretched fabrics and other varied materials as supports, establishing a distinctive method based on the repetition of an organic form. Working with dye, acrylic paint, tar and other materials, he has fundamentally reconsidered the relationships between support, surface, colour and material, expanding the possibilities of painting. He is known as one of the founding members of Supports/Surfaces, a movement that emerged in France from the late 1960s into the 1970s.

His work is held in major public collections including the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel; CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux; and Musée Fabre, Montpellier.

Claude Viallat, CF 3.9.54, 1979, Acrylic on Tent, 360×570cm

Gianfranco Zappettini
Born in 1939 in Genoa, Italy. He currently lives and works in Chiavari. Zappettini is one of the leading figures of Pittura Analitica (Analytical Painting) in Italian post-war art, and since the 1970s has continued to investigate the structure, materiality and process of painting. Through bodies of work such as the white works, where white acrylic paint is layered over an initially black ground, and Tele Sovrapposte, in which multiple canvases are superimposed, he has reconsidered the relationships between the visible and the invisible, presence and absence, and what appears on the pictorial surface and the structure that lies beneath it. In 1977, he participated in documenta 6 in Kassel, further establishing his international reputation.

Selected exhibitions include Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Paris; Museo della Permanente, Milan; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce, Genoa; and Vasarely Museum, Pécs.

Gianfranco Zappettini, ele sovrapposte n.181, 1975, Graphite on canvas, 80×80cm

In cooperation with Kamakura Gallery

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