Blanton Museum of Art
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Byron Kim
Synecdoche, 1991/1998

Oil and wax on twenty panels on Panel
25.4 cm x 20.3 cm (10 in. x 8 in.)
Michener Acquisitions Fund, 1998


A skillful tribute to the intersection of abstraction and representation in painting, Synecdoche is also a potent statement about identity. At first glance, Synecdoche reads like a series of austere, monochromatic paintings, ranging from light pink to very dark brown. Then the viewer discovers a nearby list of twenty names in a gridded format that parallels the panels' arrangement and so concludes that these panels are, in fact, portraits. The hue of each panel replicates the skin color of each of the twenty people that Byron Kim randomly encountered on The University of Texas campus in Austin. As such, Synecdoche might be said to playfully literalize a comment made by modernist painter Brice Marden, who once referred to the surfaces of his own monochromatic paintings as "skin." Synecdoche is a term in literary criticism meaning a part that stands in for a whole. Here it refers at once to the color of each panel (which stands in for the individual sitter) and to all of the panels together (which stand in for the university population). Yet by conflating painting and personhood in such an irreverent manner, the work points to the futility-the absurdity even-of reducing human beings to their skin color alone.