Frieze Seoul 2026

Dirimart is pleased to announce its participation in Frieze Seoul 2026 with a solo booth by Karin Kneffel, featuring a recent body of paintings inspired by the Isokon Flats, one of Britain’s pioneering examples of Bauhaus-inspired architecture.

Renowned for her hyperrealist compositions, Kneffel weaves together personal memory, art-historical references and architectural spaces through meticulously layered painterly surfaces. Her works frequently revisit iconic buildings and interiors, treating them as sites where reality, memory and fiction converge. Through reflections, distortions and carefully constructed illusions, she challenges conventional ways of seeing while drawing attention to overlooked cultural narratives.

For Frieze Seoul 2026, Kneffel turns her attention to the Isokon Flats in Hampstead, designed by Wells Coates for Jack and Molly Pritchard. Completed in 1934, the building became a notable centre of intellectual and artistic exchange in London, with figures including Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, László Moholy-Nagy and Agatha Christie among its residents. Artists including Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth were also associated with building and its creative circle.

Drawing on archival fragments and imagined recollections, Kneffel reconstructs the Isokon Flats as a space in which documented history and invention coexist. Her paintings evoke the people, encounters and everyday moments that might have unfolded within the building, offering a meditation on memory, architecture and the lives that shape the history a place.

Alongside these new works, the presentation includes Kneffel’s monumental still-life compositions, including recent works depicting tulips. These compositions continue the artist’s longstanding exploration of beauty, perception and the decorative, extending the presentation from architectural memory to the act of looking itself.

Dirimart’s presentation will be on view at Booth B14 throughout Frieze Seoul 2026.

Preview: 2 September 2026