High Museum Spring Exhibits (tuesdays)
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Fri., Apr. 11 - Sun., Nov. 2
CRITIC’S PICK: Kim Chong Hak - Painter of Seoraksan, High Museum - Making its debut at the High before touring nationwide, Kim Chong Hak’s exhibition features more than seventy works that span the length of his career, presenting a type of artistic endeavor rarely seen outside his native South Korea; in his homeland Kim is popularly known as ‘the painter of Mount Seorak’ - the highest peak in the Taebaek mountain range. At Mount Seorak, Kim “forged a physical, spiritual and emotional relationship to the Korean landscape inflected by his generation’s collective memories of colonization, war, geopolitical conflict and economic crisis,” says Michael Rooks, a senior curator at the High. According to the museum, Kim’s work “reasserts the expressive potency of mountain imagery in traditional East Asian art while also demonstrating the influence of international movements of the 1970s and 1980s such as neo-expressionism and other strains of figurative painting.” - Kevin C. Madigan
Fri., Jan. 17 – Sun., May 25
CRITIC’S PICK: Thinking Eye, Seeing Mind: The Medford & Loraine Johnston Collection, High Museum - This collection mainly focuses on abstract artists from the late 1960s and 1970s, and was put together by art professor Medford Johnston and his wife Loraine. It features eighty-five works by artists such as Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Elizabeth Murray, Martin Puryear and Stanley Whitney, and “demonstrates how establishing the parameters of an art collection requires infinite patience, focus, discipline, and a keen eye,” according to an announcement from the High, to whom the collection was bequeathed. Born in Atlanta and raised in Decatur, Johnston mentored many emerging local artists during his career while actively sustaining his own studio. - Kevin C. Madigan
Mar. 7 – Sun., Aug. 10
CRITIC’S PICK: Ryoji Ikeda: Data-verse, High Museum - Ryoji Ikeda, born in Japan in 1966, is a preeminent electronic composer and media artist. The High is presenting the U.S. debut of Ikeda’s triad of vast, immersive light and sound installations that are the culmination of two decades of research “and reflects upon the progressive digitalization of an integrated global society.” Included in the show are a series of 45 monitors that take apart, analyze and recombine information in what is known as “data-verse.”“Ryoji Ikeda’s decades-long exploration of data - from sequences of alphanumeric symbols to collections of images of macro and microcosms - is more relevant than ever when data-driven decisions are precipitously changing the way people relate to the world,” says Michael Rooks, the museum’s senior curator of modern and contemporary art. “His work across sonic and visual platforms will invite our audiences to rethink conventional relationships between sound and image in our tech-saturated lives.” - Kevin C. Madigan
Coming June 13, 2025 – January 4, 2026
CRITIC’S PICK: Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing, High Museum - Photographers from the 1920s and ‘30s such as Ilse Bing, Alexander Rodchenko, Imogen Cunningham
and László Moholy-Nagy are featured in this expansive exhibition, alongside contemporary ones like Jerry Uelsmann, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Abelardo Morell. Moholy-Nagy - a Hungarian artist who also worked with sculpture, film, painting, printmaking and industrial design - had coined the term ‘New Vision’ (Neues Sehen) while a teacher at the Bauhaus art school in Germany for his theory that the camera can see the world in a way the human eye cannot.
“Not only does the early 20th century and its art movements continue to be influential, but that time also echoes our current moment - one that feels similarly consequential and innovative with the development of new emerging technologies and methods of communicating,” says Maria L. Kelly, the High’s assistant curator of photography. “The movements and happenings of a century ago are akin to those of today and those shown in the exhibition. There remains a desire for alternative ways to see and approach the world through art, and particularly through photography.” - Kevin C. Madigan
From the venue:
Kim Chong Hak, Painter of Seoraksan
The High is organizing the first American museum exhibition featuring the work of Kim Chong Hak (born 1937, Sinuiju, Korea), a master painter from South Korea popularly known as “the painter of Mount Seorak” — the highest peak in the country’s Taebaek mountain range. With more than seventy works, including new acquisitions from the High’s collection, the exhibition will span the arc of Kim’s mature career and present an aspect of Korean art in the late twentieth century little known outside of South Korea.
Having first worked as an abstract painter in the 1960s, Kim ultimately rejected the adoption of Western-style abstraction, which he viewed as a response to national melancholy brought on by previous decades of hardship and deprivation. In the late 1970s, he settled in Gangwon Province, eastern South Korea, home of Mount Seorak. There he sought out an alternative artistic discourse, moving away from the monochromatic painting popular in Korea at that time toward his unabashedly expressive style. He has since dedicated his life and work to interpreting the environs of Mount Seorak, developing an artistic and emotional attunement to the natural world during decades of self-imposed isolation in the mountains.
Thinking Eye, Seeing Mind: The Medford and Loraine Johnston Collection
In the mid-1970s, artist and Georgia State University professor Medford Johnston and his wife and collaborator Loraine began collecting works by artists who were in the vanguard of contemporary art in the late 1960s and 1970s. Although they acquired a range of paintings and objects when they first began collecting, they quickly narrowed their focus to drawings, primarily by artists working on the frontlines of abstraction in the mid-1960s during a time of great innovation and experimentation.
Today, they hold one of the finest collections of postwar American drawings and related objects of its kind, now numbering more than eighty-five works, bequeathed to the High. This exhibition—featuring works by artists including Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Elizabeth Murray, Martin Puryear, and Stanley Whitney, among many others—traces a trajectory of the evolution of American abstraction from 1960 to 1990 and can help visitors understand the various directions in abstraction that artists took during the period, as well as the motivations and context for their stylistic exploration. Thinking Eye, Seeing Mind: The Medford and Loraine Johnston Collection demonstrates how establishing the parameters of an art collection requires infinite patience, focus, discipline, and a keen eye.
Ryoji Ikeda: data-verse
Ryoji Ikeda (born 1966, Gifu, Japan; active Paris and Kyoto) is one of the world’s leading composers and media artists. In this exhibition, the High will present the US debut of data-verse, Ikeda’s trilogy of monumental, immersive light and sound installations that represents more than two decades of research by the artist and reflects upon the progressive digitalization of an integrated global society. The exhibition will also premiere new work alongside existing works, including data gram, a series of eighteen monitors that take apart, analyze, and recombine information in data-verse.
Ikeda’s immersive video projections, which will be presented floor-to-ceiling onto the walls of the museum’s largest exhibition space, feature visualizations of data extracted from mathematical theories and the study of quantum physics. His more recent work, including data-verse, incorporates open-source imagery from institutions such as NASA, CERN, and the Human Genome Project.
exhibit page here
Three Decades of Democracy: South African Works on Paper
On May 10, 1994, Nelson Mandela became the first democratically elected president of South Africa, marking the end of decades of systematic and legalized racial segregation known as apartheid. This installation commemorates the thirtieth anniversary of the end of apartheid through a presentation of South African prints and works on paper from the High's collection. The eight artists featured make observations about South African social and cultural life, employing their art to resist, witness, and reflect.
Shaheen Collection of French Works
Through the generosity of numerous collectors, benefactors, and supporters, the High Museum has assembled a distinguished collection of European art ranging in date from the fourteenth through twentieth centuries. The collection of paintings displayed in this installation represent the accomplishment of Doris and Shouky Shaheen. Collected over a span of four decades, these works were presented as a gift to the High Museum in 2019.
The Doris and Shouky Shaheen Collection focuses on French art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Within this timeframe, the paintings represent an array of styles, including the pre-Impressionist realism of Eugene Boudin's harbor views, the shimmering Impressionism of Claude Monet's and Camille Pissarro's landscapes, and the expressive modernism of Amedeo Modigliani's and Henri Matisse's figure studies.
High Museum Spring Exhibits (tuesdays) | 04/07/2025 10:00 AM