NYAB Event - Jung Hur "The Tactile and the Pictorial"

Jung Hur "The Tactile and the Pictorial"

WHITE BOX

This event has ended.

There is a dynamic confluence of Eastern and Western techniques in Jung Hur's large scale paintings. Korean born and educated he has worked first in New York and presently in Portland Maine since emigrating in 1998. Having studied traditional ink painting in Korea he now wields an ink brush loaded with acrylic paint and works on a grand scale with flamboyant physicality. Large scale abstract painting is an ambitious endeavor. Canvases over 8 feet high or wide draw immediate attention and the attendant risks, navigated in art of any size, are magnified; there is more room for error and more space to fill. Hur's working process involves a subtle layering process that generates sensuous surfaces and expansive spaces. These are innovative paintings in which figurative images are wedded to abstract structures. He explores picture making through different images that all share a discreet function as carriers for an iconic emblem that has been the central focus of much of his previous work. This emblem formed by a thick band that defines a circular shape with a narrow opening is randomly distributed across the surfaces of these recent works. The area of the band is approximately equal to the area it encloses and the size of the whole varies; in this way it is reminiscent of the Yin-Yang circle divided into black and white halves.

Occasionally Hur represents the inside shape of the icon as a solid keyhole-like form; the interior silhouette as distinct from the exterior profile. These are binary opposites central to Taoist Yin-Yang thought, and support the apparent contradictions between the precise structures and aleatory effects evident in his working processes. The most recent work features an all-over repeated pattern of a small Triskelion -a three-legged circular form that the artist painted onto a ground prepared with a large red shape in the upper half. In the lower half on top of the pattern a cloud-like ovoid of graphite powder resembles a shadow passing over the surface. This implication of a shadow adds to the illusionistic density of the abstract space. In this and all his recent works, Hur Jung succeeds in his ambition to reconcile contradictory states in a dynamic equilibrium.

-Gerard McCarthy

[Image: Jung Hur "In out in in 10100" (2011) charcoal, graphite powder, acrylic 96 x 66 in.]