Kim Lim’s Estate Finds U.S. Representation as Tina Kim Gallery Plans Art Basel Debut
Tina Kim Gallery has announced U.S. representation of the estate of Kim Lim, the Singapore-born sculptor and printmaker whose spare forms have drawn renewed attention in recent museum exhibitions. The gallery said it will present Lim’s work at Art Basel in June and follow that with her first solo exhibition in the United States in spring 2027 at its New York space. Axel Vervoordt Gallery will continue to represent the estate.
Lim was born in Singapore in 1935 to Chinese parents and spent much of her childhood in Malaysia. She later studied at Saint Martin’s School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where she met the sculptor William Turnbull, whom she married in 1960. The couple shared an admiration for Constantin Brâncuși, whose emphasis on essential form left a lasting mark on Lim’s practice.
Working in stone, wood, metal, and printmaking, Lim developed a body of work grounded in abstraction, seriality, and materiality. Her sculptures are often discussed in relation to Minimalism, but that framework only partly captures their effect. The works also register rhythm, touch, and a quiet historical consciousness. Her travels through Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia, North Africa, and the Americas informed that sensibility, as did encounters with Cycladic sculpture and ancient Chinese bronzes.
Her public debut came in 1961 with “26 Young Sculptors” at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. Though she exhibited frequently, Lim never achieved the visibility of some of her contemporaries. That has begun to shift. Major recent exhibitions include “Kim Lim: The Space Between. A Retrospective” at National Gallery Singapore in 2024, “Kim Lim: Space, Rhythm & Light” at The Hepworth Wakefield in 2023, and “Kim Lim: Water Rests, Stone Speaks” at UCCA Dune in China earlier this year.
In a statement, Tina Kim said Lim was working from “a genuinely global sensibility” at a moment when the art world lacked the framework to fully absorb it. The gallery’s new representation signals a broader reassessment of an artist whose formal restraint conceals a wide cultural reach and a durable place in postwar sculpture.
