calendario eventi  :: 

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9/7/2014

Two exhibitions

Kukje Gallery, Seoul

Hong Seung-Hye
Reminiscence

“Looking back, it seems that I was always looking back. The past is fixed, and the future is infinitely uncertain. In the end, this is about the passage of time, and about everything that changes with time.”

Kukje Gallery is pleased to present Reminiscence, a solo exhibition by Hong Seung Hye. This is the artist’s sixth solo exhibition at the Gallery. This unique exhibition presents new works, retracing the images and methods used in her older pieces, created as part of her on-going project Organic Geometry, which began in 1997. In this regard, Reminiscence is a retrospective created by new works.

Organic Geometry is a body of work that explores how form is generated in much the same way that life is germinated, and about how spaces, in turn, are constructed with such forms. With this project, the artist creates forms through the combination and accumulation of pixels, the basic unit digital imagery, that she manipulates using a computer program. In her process, the quadrangular grid is not fixed, but proliferates through endless permutations, combinations, repetitions, and dissolutions. For Hong, the new image created using this process gains motion that is organic and dynamic. It also shows disorder and dissonance when the artist tempers the formal stability of the logical grid with segmentation. Over the years, the artist’s organic-geometric images have gone through a number of formal transformations as they were moved out of the computer monitor (where they were generated) into three dimensions, where they inhabit everyday spaces in various ways. These transformational exhibitions include: Over the Layers (2004), to push to the limits the layers of time and space; Debris (2008), a repetition of segmentation and combination; On & Off (2008), to be on and off the grid simultaneously; Musical Offering (2009), to embrace musical order visually; and All about Frames (2010), a continuous attempt to renew the frame. Building on the ongoing mutability of these forms, Reminiscence is an opportunity to show work from Hong’s past exhibitions in new iterations through transformations in form and material.

Each of the many organic-geometric variations in Reminiscence are based around a grid that reproduces, divides, and proliferates without hierarchy. The show itself is reproduced as a giant and dynamic installation with each individual work in the gallery functioning as a constituent element in the larger grid in which Hong’s geometry continues to evolve organically.

Born in Seoul in 1959, Hong Seung Hye studied fine art at Seoul National University, receiving her B.F.A. in 1982. She went on to attend Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (The National School of Fine Arts) in Paris, graduating in 1986. Since then, Hong has held more than twenty private exhibitions and participated in numerous group shows both in Korea and abroad. Beginning with her 1997 show Organic Geometry at Kukje Gallery, Hong’s work has demonstrated a deep interest in exploring the possibilities of actual spaces and forms created using computer pixels. A recipient of the Total Art Award (1997) and the Lee Joong Sup Award (2007), Hong currently holds a position as a professor in the Department of Fine Arts at Seoul National University of Science and Technology.

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Alexander Calder
Jewelry

Kukje Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Alexander Calder Jewelry, a very special solo exhibition devoted to the artwork and singular vision of one of the twentieth century’s most revered artists. While best known as a sculptor of his signature mobiles and stabiles, Calder is equally renowned for his work as a painter and jeweler. Indeed, jewelry—more aptly termed “wearable art”—was a central element in Calder’s practice throughout his life. The exhibit at Kukje, curated with the assistance of the Calder Foundation, centers around Calder’s many exquisite examples of wearable art along with works on paper, toys, and sculptures. Together, this eclectic exhibition showcases the artist’s iconic themes and renews our appreciation for his conceptual breadth and formal ingenuity.

Made from materials as diverse as steel, silver and gold wire, and shards of glass, Calder’s many wearable artworks shed light on and inform his work in sculpture and other media. The material mastery that defines his mobiles and wire sculpture is at work in his huge repertoire, including paintings and drawings, toys, and bracelets, necklaces, brooches, and earrings. The deceptively simple techniques for shaping wire and other prosaic materials used by Calder can be seen as a kind of conceptual framework and emotional foundation for much of what defined his life’s work: themes of play, formal elegy, physical movement, and the magic of metamorphosis. These different but complementary vocabularies can be seen in many of Calder’s signature motifs such as the spiral and his exquisite use of balanced forms, his celebration and framing of fragments, and his uncanny ability to encompass the wearer’s own body as part of the work.

It is no surprise that Calder’s jewelry was from the very onset wildly popular and worn by some of the most fashionable and forward-thinking artists and women of society. From the 1920s onward, friends such as Georgia O’Keeffe and collectors such as Peggy Guggenheim, as well as fashion models and movie stars, all clamored and sometimes risked injury to wear and be framed by Calder’s visionary objects. The central role of the body is highlighted in Kukje’s exhibition design, which includes large-scale historic photographs of these personalities modeling Calder’s wearable art — powerful images that reconnect the sculptures to his love of performance and the marvelous power of kinetic art. Together, the works on paper, jewelry, sculpture, and toys in Alexander Calder Jewelry renew our appreciation for the power and dynamism of one of the twentieth century’s most important artists.

Image: Hong Seung-Hye, Organic Geometry 2014 Inkjet print 40x40cm

Kukje Gallery K2 & K3
K1 54 Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu Seoul, 110-200 Korea
K2 48-10 Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu Seoul, 110-200 Korea
Opening Hours: Monday – Saturday: 10am-6pm / Sunday, Holiday: 10am-5pm

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