Dabin Ahn: Golden Days

Golden Days, on view at François Ghebaly’s Los Angeles space through February 14, brings together ten paintings and two sculptures that distill Dabin Ahn’s now-signature vocabulary: candles, Korean porcelain, fireflies, moths, cranes, and fragments of personal objects hovering in a carefully constructed, hushed atmosphere. Ahn is best known for figurative yet resolutely minimal, quiet paintings in which soft gradients, nearly absent brushwork, and a meticulously controlled surface generate a striking calm. Irregularly shaped canvases and hand-crafted artist frames set the stage in which time seems to pause around the small flames and pinpricks of light; their fleeting, warm glow is caught and held on glass, ceramic, and wood, as if the picture plane itself became a vessel for duration.

By doing so, the works in Golden Days extend Ahn’s longstanding dialogue between painting and sculpture. While he has concentrated primarily on painting in recent years, the sculptural dimension has reemerged into the construction of the painting itself. Hand-carved wooden frames cut open at the edges reveal secondary and tertiary images—candles painted along the sides of the canvas, for instance, whose imagined light spills inward onto celadon vases and glass goblets in works such as Soliloquy, Repose, and Golden Days I and II. In many canvases, vessels and personal effects—eyeglasses, watches, handwritten notes—appear to hover in states of dissolution or reconstitution, suspended between presence and absence, becoming and unbecoming. Moths, cranes, and fireflies seem to step out of the decorative imagery that might once have adorned the vessels’ glazing, as in Above and Beyond, where a small crane looks ready to escape the canvas while its companions remain bound to the porcelain surface.

Dabin Ahn, Golden Days II, 2025. Oil on linen in artist’s frame — 15.5 x 9.5 inches / 40 x 24 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, New York.

Dabin Ahn, Ephemeral (Nocturne), 2025. Oil on linen over panel, mother of pearl inlay, turquoise, brass, cast resin, in artist’s frame — 17 × 12 inches / 43 × 30.5 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, New York.

Dabin Ahn, Golden Days, 2025. Oil on linen in artist's frame — 15.5 x 9.5 inches / 39 x 24 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, New York.

Dabin Ahn, Home, 2025. Oil on linen in artist’s frame — 18 x 13 inches / 45.5 x 33 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, New York.

Dabin Ahn, Repose, 2025. Oil on linen and walnut — 19 x 13 inches / 48 x 33 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, New York.

Dabin Ahn, Untitled (Dad), 2025. Oil on linen and walnut — 21 x 14 inches / 53.5 x 35.5 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, New York.

Dabin Ahn, Repose, 2025. Oil on linen and walnut — 19 x 13 / inches 48 x 33 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, New York.

Dabin Ahn, Warmth, 2025. Oil on linen in artist frame — 15 x 9.75 inches / 38 x 25 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, New York.

 

 

Throughout, wood itself becomes both support and subject: its grain painted with the same trompe-l’œil care Ahn applies to glass and porcelain, further intensifying the Paragone-like tension between painting and sculpture, surface and volume, illusion and object. Two small wooden sculptures, Ephemeral and Ephemeral II, punctuate the exhibition space. Each features a solitary candle flame painted on a small burl inlaid with turquoise and elevated on a brass rod, extending the motif of light into three dimensions. Within the context of Golden Days, they read almost as devotional objects: modest altars to memory, grief, and continuity, reinforcing the sense that Ahn treats each painting and sculpture as a kind of relic—the level of finish and care, the slow accumulation of detail, and the quiet symbolism of his motifs.

Born in Seoul in 1988 and now based in Chicago, Dabin Ahn received his BFA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Harper’s (New York), 1969 (New York), OCHI (Los Angeles), and Shatto Gallery (Los Angeles), and in group exhibitions at Make Room and The Hole in Los Angeles, as well as Harper’s in East Hampton. For more information, please consult François Ghebaly’s website here.

Installation view, Dabin Ahn, Golden Days, 2026. François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, US. Courtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, New York. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Installation view, Dabin Ahn, Golden Days, 2026. François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, US. Courtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, New York. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Installation view, Dabin Ahn, Golden Days, 2026. François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, US. Courtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, New York. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Installation view, Dabin Ahn, Golden Days, 2026. François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, US. Courtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, New York. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Installation view, Dabin Ahn, Golden Days, 2026. François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, US. Courtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, New York. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Installation view, Dabin Ahn, Golden Days, 2026. François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, US. Courtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, New York. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Installation view, Dabin Ahn, Golden Days, 2026. François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, US. Courtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, New York. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Installation view, Dabin Ahn, Golden Days, 2026. François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, US. Courtesy of the Artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, New York. Photo: Paul Salveson.

 

 

Last Updated on January 27, 2026