Arario Gallery and Pace Gallery are each showing two exhibitions simultaneously, offering a chance to explore paintings and installations from renowned global artists and emerging talents. Homegrown gallery Arario shows paintings and installations by new Korean artists, while Pace Gallery is showing the first-ever presentation of American sculptor Louise Nevelson and an exhibition of works by British painter Nigel Cooke.

Arario Gallery

Arario is showing two exhibitions, “Metissage” and “Silver,” by two artists -- Yohan Han and Koo Ji-yoon, both in their 40s, running through June 2.

As hinted in the exhibition’s title, “Metissage,” a French term that refers to mixing or blending, Han examines how digital technologies alter our perception of the body in an era where physical presence is “increasingly elusive."

One of the key elements in the artist’s work is a drum made from animal hide, which is used not only as a percussion instrument but also as an object in shamanistic rituals across various indigenous cultures.

Koo’s works embody the time that passes in the city, depicting the condensed psychological landscape and ever-changing characteristics of cities. She observes old buildings in Seoul and elsewhere, and reflects on the tragic fates of these buildings, according to the gallery.

The artist titled the exhibition “Silver” to reflect the color of the capital city -- somewhere between grey, symbolizing erasure, and silver symbolizing reflection. “As I paint, I often think that the overlapping brushstrokes resemble the temporality of the city. In the process of layering, erasing and covering again, the surface of the painting ceases to be a simple image -- it becomes a site where time has seeped in,” the artist said of her works.

Pace Gallery

Pace Gallery is showing exhibitions by two artists -- American sculptor Louise Nevelson and British painter Nigel Cooke.

Works by Nevelson, who died in 1988, are rooted in the legacies of Cubism and Constructivism and were widely celebrated during her lifetime for incorporating unexpected combinations of materials and forms.

The exhibition “The Fourth Dimension” features a selection of the artist’s rarely-exhibited wall reliefs in black painted wood from the 1960s and 1970s, shown in dialogue with her intimate and enigmatic collages from the 1950s through the 1980s. The exhibition also explores the artist’s metaphysical focus on shadow, which she described as “the fourth dimension.”

Another exhibition, “Sea Mirror,” shows new paintings by Cooke across the gallery’s second and third floors, bringing together the artist’s never-before-seen canvases created as part of his new experimentations with portrait formats and panoramic scales. These are accompanied by a selection of 11 paintings on paper produced on the Spanish island of Formentera.

Cooke is renowned for his evocative, atmospheric paintings that blend figurative and abstract forms within layered compositions. He draws inspiration from a diverse range of subjects, including literature, paleontology, neuroscience, mythology and zoology, merging personal narratives with broader cultural and natural histories. The exhibitions run through May 17.