Simultaneity presents an ongoing series based on the Korean Dansaekhwa monochrome movement by artist Suh Seung Won (b. 1941), a pioneer of geometric abstraction in Korean contemporary art. Expanding on a career across five decades, Suh’s Simultaneity series explores his continued meditations on the concurrence of time and space, expressed through interactions between geometric forms and the underlying surface.
This exhibition primarily shows Suh’s works created between 1970 and the present, in which the rigid geometric forms found in his earlier works shift into more obscure, diaphanous patterns, creating new depths within the surface of the picture plane. This expansion of Suh’s previous abstractions produces works which appear monochrome from a distance, but upon closer examination are revealed to be composed of a variety of colors, allowing the artist to show the coexistence of the visible and the invisible aspects of reality.
Suh seeks to enable the unseen to be seen through the use of the physical medium of paint to render the “world of nirvana”, the intangible phenomena beyond human awareness. The harmonious balance between space and form found in the Simultaneity series exposes a truth beyond the limits of visible human reality. For Suh Seung Won, these works explore the ways in which the consistency of time can be interpreted through the consistency of space in a unification of form, color and surface.
Works by Suh Seung Won are included in the permanent collections of The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Korea), Seoul Museum of Art (Korea), The British Museum (UK), Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art (Japan), Shimonoseki Museum (Japan), and the Brooklyn Museum (US). His works have been featured in key international exhibitions, including “Five Korea Artists, Five Kinds of White” at the Tokyo Gallery (1975), “Korea: Facet of Contemporary Art” at the Tokyo Museum (1983), “Art Contemporain Coreén” at the Cordeliers Convent in Paris (1995), “The Facet of Korean and Japanese Contemporary Art” at the Gwangju Biennale (2000), and “Origin” at the Galerie Perrotin in Paris (2016).
This exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Donghwa Cultural Foundation.
ASIA WEEK ARTIST TALK:
with Suh Seung Won
Followed by:
Special recorded commentary by Raphael Rubinstein
Art critic and curator Raphael Rubinstein will address the work of Suh Seung Won in the context of 20th century abstraction and contemporary painting, noting how Suh has developed a distinct approach that highlights the perceptual, meditative qualities of abstraction in which the borders between figure and ground seem to dissolve.
THURSDAY, MARCH 14, 2019 | 6:30 PM
@ The Korea Society
350 Madison Avenue, 24th Floor, NYC
Gallery hours: 10 AM – 4:30 PM by appointment
For more information, please contact info@koreasociety.org or call (212) 759-7525.
Of Interest:
The New York Times: The Buddhas, Gods and Emperors of Asia Week New York
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