Take My Eyes Off is an exhibition that examines painting―entangled in a turbulent affair with ‘vision’ and ‘image’―and highlights the strategies of contemporary painting. The exhibition presents contemporary painting that responds to today’s image-saturated visual environment and seeks a new ‘visuality,’ using the motif of the ‘eye’ to reveal painting’s potential as a site of practice. Framed by the Seoul Museum of Art’s 2025 agenda of ‘Action’ and featured as part of Buk-Seoul Museum of Art’s special theme, ‘Countermoves of Painting,’ Take My Eyes Off seeks to reexamine contemporary painting and invite social and cultural reflection through painting.
Painting is a visual art form that uses color and line to create shapes on a two-dimensional surface such as canvas or paper. Bound by its flat, motionless surface and the expectation that it presents an image that is either beautiful or pleasing to look at, painting was long regarded as a static form―an art without a future. Yet, as art historian David Joselit has declared, painting remains a “live medium,” one that is constantly entangled with reality and unfolding “on the air.” Contemporary painting actively engages with the logic of images as they circulate and are consumed in the digital age, renewing itself in the process. In doing so, it reveals how images affect and collide with our vision. It moves and awakens the eyes bound to the image, urging us to imagine a path forward―not a closed ending. Painting is no longer a flat image hanging on a wall, nor merely something pleasing to the eye―it is a simultaneous stage that constantly throws our vision into motion.
Take My Eyes Off presents the story of painting pushing against its own limits―focusing on contemporary works that shake our vision loose from the images it clings to. Eight painters explore perceptual and cognitive shifts, working at the intersection of image and vision. Their works give form to the strategies of contemporary painting and point toward a narrative that remains “on the air.” Structured in four parts, the exhibition unfolds like a film or drama. And it begins with this: our eyes tremble. And then―they take off.
