Untitled 1971

Kim Lim was a Singaporean-born sculptor and printmaker who studied at Saint Martin’s School of Art, London from 1954-1956 and later graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art, London in 1960. Her public career emerged as part of a generation of, predominantly male, British sculptors who rejected naturalist tendencies in sculpture in favour of a turn towards abstraction. They included Anthony Caro, John Latham, Philipp King, William Tucker, and Lim’s husband William Turnbull.

In 1966 Lim held her first solo show at London’s Axiom Gallery and her early sculptures in wood demonstrate an abstraction of form and a faithfulness to materials that resonates with the principles of art making found in the work of Romanian modernist and family friend, Constantin Brancusi. By the 1970’s an interest in simplified geometric forms dominated both her sculptures and printmaking. Lim’s interest in the tension between line and colour, form and absence and between stasis and movement can be traced to her travels to architectural sites in India, China, Japan and Southeast Asia where she used photography to document roof structures, colonnades, sun lit facades and dark recesses.

Over the course of her career, Lim had solo exhibitions at the Tate; the National Museum of Art, Singapore; Modern Art Oxford; the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield and Camden Arts Centre. Her work has been included in group shows around the world and is part of public collections including: National Museum of Art, Singapore; Museum of Modern Art, Nagaoka, Japan; Fukuyama City Museum, Hiroshima, Japan; Middelheim Open Air Museum, Antwerp; Tate; Arts Council Collection; Contemporary Art Society; Government Art Collection and The Hepworth Wakefield.