NEW YORK, NY.- James Cohan will present A Little Deepness, an exhibition of new and historic work by Byron Kim, on view from April 10 through May 9, 2026, at the gallery’s 48 Walker Street location. This is Kim’s fifth solo exhibition with James Cohan. The gallery will host an opening reception with the artist on Friday, April 10 from 6-8 PM.

A Little Deepness brings together early large-scale skyscapes with an entire year of Kim’s landmark ongoing Sunday Paintings series. Together, these works celebrate a lifelong dedication to the close observation of the natural world, offering an intimate and expansive portrait of an artist for whom abstraction has long expressed the interconnectivity of the universe. Kim’s paintings occupy a territory between realism and minimalism, between romanticism and conceptualism—closer in spirit to Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, and Agnes Martin than to landscape tradition, yet thoroughly grounded in specific places and moments.

Anchoring the exhibition are a selection of formative early skyscapes. The year 2000 marked a significant shift in the central focus of Kim’s practice: while previous works investigated the perceptual instabilities of color as it related to memory and the human body, the new millennium saw the artist looking out at the world around him to explore different dimensions of the relationship between part and whole. The earliest work of its kind, the monumental Sunday Painting, 2000-2001, depicts luminous expanses of blue, bisected into two distinct views by the suggestion of a horizon line. This work, painted from inventive recollection rather than direct observation, holds the potent germ of an idea that would later bloom into a life’s work, recorded in weekly increments. In A Little Deepness (for Glenn), 2004, Kim renders a similarly vast sky so cloudless it approaches a monochrome. The work’s title, drawn from a turn of phrase often used by Kim’s close friend and fellow artist Glenn Ligon, suggests the emotional and psychological depths of abstraction, as well as the alchemical calibrations of light and color at play in the painting. These early skyscapes illuminate the deep roots of Kim’s practice in the interplay between close looking and memory, and underscore how consistently the artist has sought, in the space above us, a measure of the world below.

Since January 2001, Kim has kept a singular weekly ritual: every Sunday, he looks upward, mixes paint to match a patch of sky and renders it on a small canvas. Inscribed across each painted field is a brief journalistic entry—sometimes mundane, sometimes momentous—that records the specific place, time, and thoughts of the day. The resulting Sunday Paintings are a chronicle of lived experience, by turns intimate and universal, in which clouds, children’s milestones, political upheavals, and personal reckoning share the same quietly radiant surface. Kim has spoken of the series as his longest and most personal project, one that reflects his abiding question: “My work has mostly been concerned with the relationship of a part to the whole. How am I connected to the others in the world, and how are we all connected to the greater whole?”

A Little Deepness presents a full year of Sunday Paintings from 2024, allowing viewers to witness the series in its most essential form: as a calendar, a diary, and a meditation on duration. This year is one marked by the pleasures and irritations of modern life–numerous games of Go and unexpected travel delays–as well as moments of profound joy and loss–the arrival of the artist’s first grandchild and the death of his father. One Sunday, Kim might muse on the canvas before him, noting: “The sky has arcs of pillowy clouds with cerulean in between. My depiction is too general and too gestural, but there is something I like about this painting.” Another might find his thoughts elsewhere: “I feel rusty somehow. Or maybe distracted. Or maybe it’s just hard to paint a perfect little cloud. The women’s NCAA basketball finals are happening right now and my mind is at a bar eating some fries watching Caitlin Clark drain some threes.” Others reveal the prosaic thoughts of a teaching artist: “Occasionally students treat each other so poorly, it makes me want to retire from teaching.” Seen together, the works reveal how profoundly the sky both accommodates and outlasts everything beneath it, remaining a subject of wispy clouds, vibrant blues, or dreary greys that holds the particularity of each Sunday.