Kyung Youl Yoon “The Cubic Inception Series”

Kyung Youl Yoon “The Cubic Inception Series”

The Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Gallery

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The Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Gallery presents Cubic Inception, a solo exhibition of noted New York-based Korean abstract painter Kyung Youl Yoon. The show, featuring some twenty works realized by Yoon in the last two years.

Kyung Youl Yoon was born in Seoul, where he was trained and where he began his career. In the late 1980s Yoon moved to Madrid, Spain, where he continued his studies and was widely exhibited. He has lived and worked in the New York area since 1995.

Yoon began his Cubic Inception series in 2015 as a response both to global climate change and to the alienation of contemporary urban life. Most of all, he began adding sculptural elements to his paintings to “break the indifference of onlookers,” as he has written, “to create an exchange where the viewer begins to […] reflect on a new thought or idea that eliminates obscurity in the forms and creates personal meaning.” Yoon’s depiction of the city, in his words, is composed “of the idea of its components, whether… materialistic goods such as apartments, furniture, [or] phones, or the wide spectrum of thoughts in our minds. It [all] becomes a large matrix of cubes forming a collection of ideas.”

The survey of Yoon’s’ recent Cubic Inception works has been organized by Peter Frank, the New York-born, Los Angeles-based critic and curator. Frank notes that the Cubic Inception paintings “extend Yoon’s painterly practice into sculpture, into a low relief of a kind that cannot logically be derived from painting. These thick clusters of aluminum shells, thoroughly covering the Cubic Inception surfaces or interrupted with vast, bottomless swaths of a single color (red, for instance, or a silvery gray that seems to leach from the metal), animate those surfaces with both two-dimensional pattern and three-dimensional texture. Each shape takes the place of a brushstroke. Each edge takes the place of a line. The resulting masses of forms […] strongly suggest aerial views of industrial landscapes, articulated topographies of beautiful but implicitly hostile environments. The Cubic Inception paintings brim with both metaphorical resonance and tactile allure.”

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• Painting

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