NYAB Event - Su Kwak "Light and Time: Recent Painting"

Su Kwak "Light and Time: Recent Painting"

This event has ended.
At June Kelly Gallery
Media: Painting

An exhibition of new paintings by Su Kwak in which the Korean-born artist continues her provocative explorations of light and color on carefully sliced canvases will open at the June Kelly Gallery on Thursday, 11 June.

Su Kwak believes, says art historian Sandy Kita in the exhibition catalogue, that “painting must manifest concepts, feelings and other nonmaterial things in a tangible physical form,” and not simply “report on, record or respond to what the eye sees.”

Kwak seeks to “capture light, which is immaterial, in the material form of her paintings,” Kita writes. For Kwak, light has spiritual meaning, but the spirit, says Kita, “being so much more a thing of God, ultimately has to be left in the realm of the mysterious.”

Water, the sky, rainbows, the sun are among Kwak’s other material subjects that “have the power to manifest immaterial light. … What Kwak chooses to paint always pushes past the literal,” Kita notes.

For many years, Kwak has been cutting and folding her canvases. The folds and cuts were once small, Kita comments, but they have now grown to the points where the slit in one recent work reaches more than half way across the large canvas.

[Image: Su Kwak "Healing Light #9" (2004) acrylic on canvas, 54 x 72 x 4 in]