2023. 3. 16 – 4. 6
Guk Daeho

In celebration of March and the bright glimmer of spring, Gallery BK is hosting g l e a m, a solo show presenting the artist Guk Daeho who is renowned for materializing and rendering the pureness and essence of color — one of painting’s most fundamental elements — from March 16 to April 6 at Gallery BK Hannam.

Guk’s practice consists of fastidiously arranging the moments at which light and color coalesce. Sometimes in warm shades and sometimes in vibrant, exaggerated hues, he uses a squeegee to push each of his colors and create a bright, roughly-textured seared-on effect that wholly retains the symphony of the colors coalescing. Also, Guk variegates the density, speed, and orientation of his medium in every one of his works to investigate the essence of painterly painting.

The color field painting was a movement in which the artists aspired to achieve the utmost formal simplicity by composing a single, planar view and focusing on the flatness inherent to the genre of painting. The painting school’s aim was to deliver an overwhelming sense of depth and sublimity by covering the canvas’s two-dimensional plane with only a single element, color, creating a new channel of abstract communication that depends solely on the emotional content of colors and not any form or pictorial image. Guk’s color fields of remarkable orderliness, levitating leisurely across the walls of the gallery and glowing even more brightly as they meet a third element, light, chronicle a causal, overarching narrative of the various emotions that color delivers as an element.

In the aesthetics of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), there are the core concepts of sensation and figure. Deleuze claimed that, for painting to evade the banal and representational, it must either pursue a purity of form through abstraction or journey towards the figurative by extracting and isolating things from context. Also, he emphasized that creation happens only when sensation is activated. Deleuze’s aesthetic philosophy is the first step to elucidating the identity of abstractionist painting; for instance, Guk’s paintings are figurative abstractions that utilize color — a pure essence in painterly practice — and can be understood as a cross-pollination of the abstract purity of form and the sensational creation Deleuze had outlined. Guk’s paintings, born from the coalescence of color and light, contain the depth and density of his years-long search for the essence of painterly practice. Moreover, he materializes the rhythmic resonance of colors through a mastery of the material he has accumulated from countless hours of earnest research and endeavor. It is perhaps only natural that his works seize the attention of every beholder.

“I once again recall the words of the now-deceased Bernard Loiseau, a French chef who was renowned worldwide in his time. He said, ‘Food is memory. A wild berry you picked while exploring the wild as a child or a mother’s dish of care and love — you can vividly recall the taste at these moments even after decades.’ Like Loiseau, I remember landscapes and scenes as a selection of colors rather than seeing them as a circumstance or situation. Color is something irreplaceable in painting, and as someone who investigates its essence and devises means to express it, I once again use color and the canvas as my excuses and explore my memory every day.” – Excerpted from Guk’s artist statement

Guk continues to expand the painterly spectrum of his colors on a brilliant journey.

Min Choi, Managing Director, Gallery BK

Gallery BK Hannam
25 Daesagwan-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, Korea

Gallery BK Itaewon
56, Itaewon-ro 42-gil, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, Korea
+82 2 790 7079

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