Minjae Kim | Phantom–22

Marta is pleased to announce Phantom–22, the gallery’s long-awaited second solo presentation of work by Korean-born, New York-based artist Minjae Kim. Named for P-22, the mountain lion who famously resided in Griffith Park from 2012 until his death in 2022, the exhibition’s title makes reference to the spectres of the city—to the passage of creatures, ideas, and topographies that define Los Angeles as it continues its constant shift between fantasy and reality, eternal within that splendid rift.

Following the lauded I Was Evening All Afternoon (2021), the artist’s first solo outing with Marta, Phantom–22 is Kim’s largest and most ambitious presentation to date. Taking as its initial starting point the seminal silent film One Week (Buster Keaton, 1920), the exhibition embraces its source material’s traditions of practical effects and set-building through the fabrication of small-scale architectural follies and attendant scenography within the gallery’s double-height envelope. Realized in wood, paint, clay, plaster, aluminum, and fiberglass, the generous cadre of works that comprise Phantom–22 rest comfortably and generously in the four-part Venn diagram of sculpture, set decoration, production design, and prop-making. In part and whole, they conjure up a bricolage love-letter to Keaton’s then-nascent Los Angeles: fiberglass palm fronds, vaguely-anthropomorphic building façades, mock automobiles, and bygone watering holes merge in an installation that invites discovery and places a surreal lens on familiar and unfamiliar regional tropes.