Yool Kim & Noah Becker
Gallery Merrick
May 2 – May 11, 2025
Images courtesy of Gallery Merrick and the artists
The two-person exhibition of Yool Kim and Noah Becker at Gallery Merrick is a deft pairing that maintains aesthetic tension and quiet harmonies. At first glance, the show pits two distinct visual languages against each other: Kim’s “lyrical, intensely emotive figuration and Becker’s sharply contoured, figurative paintings that deal with duality. The connections become apparent — both artists are preoccupied with the slippery tags of identity and the porous membrane between interior and exterior worlds. The exhibition feels like an elegant conversation between two sensibilities negotiating the thresholds of memory, myth, reflection, and selfhood.
Yool Kim’s paintings are a masterclass in restraint. Her canvases bloom with delicate color fields, ethereal shapes, and just the faintest whisper of gesture, as if the paint were breathing rather than fixed to the surface. Kim’s works radiate an almost devotional calm, calling to mind the atmospheric luminosity of Agnes Martin or the poetic reticence of Vija Celmins. But beneath the serenity is a quiet radicalism: The insistence on Kim’s slowness, hovering between presence and absence, feels almost defiant in an age of spectacle. The works pull you in like a riddle with no need for resolution.
By contrast, Noah Becker’s paintings crackle with presence. A painter, musician, and editor, Becker is a true polymath, and his paintings are saturated with a restless, searching energy. His figures, often presented against flattened or ambiguous grounds, carry a knowing awkwardness — they’re elegant but slightly off-kilter, like jazz musicians stretching a phrase past its breaking point. There’s something of the metaphysical in
Becker’s work, too: the figures seem to hover between personal narrative and archetype, inviting the viewer to project their own stories onto the painted skin. His “duality” paintings stand out as some of the most compelling works in the show, embodying a psychological split that feels both intimate and universal. In these canvases, Becker seems to wrestle with the tension between his public and private selves, often depicting figures divided, mirrored, or doubled within the same frame. Faces blur into masks; bodies fragment and recombine, suggesting the multiplicity of identity in an era of constant self-performance. There’s a theatricality to these works, but it’s laced with vulnerability — Becker isn’t merely performing for the viewer; he’s revealing the cracks in the performance itself. This duality becomes a metaphor for the artist’s own multidisciplinary life, as well as a larger commentary on the fragmented nature of contemporary experience.
What makes this pairing particularly successful is the way the two artists sharpen each other’s strengths. Kim’s subtlety amplifies the intensity of Becker’s figuration, while Becker’s nervy linework underscores the delicate precision of Kim’s touch. Together, they create a visual rhythm that oscillates between quietude and clamor, surface and depth, abstraction and figuration. It’s a reminder that painting, at its best, is less about style than about sensibility — and that opposites don’t merely attract, they amplify.
In a moment when so much contemporary art feels either didactic or decorative, this exhibition offers something rarer: a dialogue between two artists deeply invested in the poetics of looking and being looked at. Kim and Becker remind us that painting can still surprise, still whisper, still shout — and still matter. The show lingers in the mind like a half-remembered melody, coaxing the viewer back for another look.
