Haeri Yoo
dal 6/11/2008 al 5/12/2008
Segnalato da
6/11/2008
Haeri Yoo
Thomas Erben Gallery, New York
Pain Patch. In her abstract expressionistic cartoon paintings and works on paper, the artist, who is known for her ability to weave disrupted narratives of feministic and culturally attuned mayhem, brings together the formal sensibility of her native Korea, psychological tension, outsider art and gestural figuration.
Thomas Erben is pleased to present new paintings by Haeri Yoo. After
a successful solo presentation of her work at dc Düsseldorf last year
and inclusions in several shows with the gallery, including in
Shanghai and Mumbai, this is the artist's first - highly anticipated
- solo exhibition.
Like an anthropomorphic car crash, Yoo's paintings present to the
viewer an incendiary collision of colors and angles that still
vibrate and groan with the agony of suddenly arrested, piled up and
compacted narratives. In comparison to her previous work, Yoo's
intensified new collection reveals a tightened, brooding palette of
medicinal colors, an expansion of scale and the addition of texture
through gloss and accretion.
Lilly Wei, in a 2007 catalogue published by the AHL Foundation,
describes Yoo's paintings as "wild, emotive, raw [and] ambitious."
She further elaborates:
"Her images are transgressive, sexually fraught, with feminist
leanings and psychological twists. They are improvised, spontaneous
and indebted to ... graffiti and pop. The boldness of her color
scheme and her rhythmic deployment of paint [brushed] onto the canvas
with great gusto is utterly compelling, as are her idiosyncratic
figurations. The scale is encompassing and effective in creating a
supercharged environment of suspended belief, as you enter her highly
imaginative, uninhibited domain with its doubled impact of high
feeling and weighty materiality."
Yoo's work is overwhelmed by a primordial gesture that aims at giving
physical signification to the pre-mirror stage, wherein the
differentiation between self, other and environment are not blurred
but non-existent. Rather than originating from a Western
expressionistic tradition, Yoo imbues the whole visual field with a
Korean sensibility of brushwork as chi, or energy, thus giving a life
force to the medium itself and our perception of it. Emotions are as
heightened as they are fleeting, bodily conscious but un-invested.
The jubilation found in self-awareness is not yet a possibility in
Yoo's preconscious, anarchistic wilderness.
Haeri Yoo (b. 1970, Korea) lives and works in Brooklyn and is a MFA
graduate of Pratt Institute. She has shown at the Queens Museum of
Art, the Bronx River Arts Center, Rush Arts Gallery, Mehr Gallery
and, most recently, in the Simon Watson curated Defining a Moment,
House of Campari Exhibition. Yoo was awarded the 2007 Visual Award
from the AHL Foundation (first prize), a residency at the Henry
Street Settlement, a Korea Cultural Council Grant and was a
participant in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Swing Space
program. Forthcoming, her work will be included in Paintwork at the
Saatchi Gallery in London. Yoo's work has been commented upon in The
New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, NY Newsday and will be featured in
the forthcoming issue of Whitewall Magazine.
The Saatchi Collection, London, as well as Bose Krishnamachari,
Mumbai; Craig Robins, Florida; Aurel Scheibler, Berlin; Nicola
Cernetic, Turin - to name a few - have included her work in their
collections.
Reception for the artist: Friday, November 7, 6 - 8:30 pm
Thomas Erben Gallery
516 West 20th Street 212 - New York
Gallery hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10-6
Free admission