Scroll is pleased to present Countryside Manners, a solo exhibition of new works by Daniel Um, opening Thursday, April 30 from 6-8pm at 291 Grand Street. This is the artist's first solo exhibition with the gallery.

In his latest body of work, Um explores the thin veil between the performance of adulthood and the sanctuary of childhood imagination. Developed over weekend trips into the bucolic landscapes of Upstate New York and Pennsylvania, these paintings serve as a step back from the friction of urban life, seeking reset within the quietude of the rural horizon.

Countryside Manners centers on figures — often solitary or in pairs — traversing deep forests and open fields. Adorned with animal masks and hats, they evoke the literal, transformative power of a child's imagination. Drawing from the whimsical, hand-constructed nature of Paul Klee's puppets, Um's characters suggest that masking is not a relic of youth, but a vital survival mechanism. By assuming these identities, the figures 'forgive' their own reality, escaping into a world where judgment is absent. This relationship between the figure and the environment is informed by the candid, unstaged essence of Justine Kurland's Girl Pictures, where the landscape is not just a backdrop, but a collaborator in the search for a child-like freedom.

The emotional core of Countryside Manners is rooted in the jewel-toned parables of Oscar Wilde. The bittersweet morality of Wilde's classic short story The Selfish Giant and the sacrificial beauty of The Nightingale and the Rose (reimagined here through the wit of The Nightingale and the Fox) provide a narrative framework for the paintings. There is a persistent sense of rest in these pieces — a quality that mirrors the atmospheric subtlety and longing found in German Romanticism, where the vastness of nature offers a neutral ground for the soul to wander.

In Midwood's Twilight, Um utilizes the raw, vertical partitioning of Abstract Expressionist painter Clyfford Still to ground the composition, but the internal 'manners' of the painting are dictated by the rhythmic shorthand of Klee. The result is a series of chromatic intervals, where the heavy lifting of a massive composition allows for a lighter, more lyrical interaction between the figures and their surrounding environment.

Um's studio process was further guided by the 'stretched' phrases of Romantic composer Gustav Mahler's Adagietto. The music's tempo allowed for a widening of the palette, using layers of color to extend the horizon line and create a sense of subtle intimacy.

Daniel Um (b. 2001, Seoul) currently lives and works in New York City. He received his BFA in Illustration from Parsons School of Design, New York, in 2024. He has exhibited with The Cabin, Los Angeles; Make Room, Los Angeles; Collaborations, Copenhagen; Painters Painting Paintings, Amsterdam; Linseed Projects, Shanghai; Turn Gallery, New York; Latitude Gallery, New York; Uffner & Liu, New York; Long Story Short, New York; Hew Hood Gallery, London; Galerie Hussenot, Paris, among others. With Scroll, Daniel was part of a two-person exhibition, alongside Rowley Haynes, in 2024, and group exhibitions in 2025 and 2026. Daniel is represented by Scroll.

For more information and inquiries, please email info@scroll.nyc.