[Exhibition of the Week] Korean geometric abstract art – Toby Ziegler ‘Destroyed Idols’ and more.

This week’s exhibition roundup introduces a variety of fascinating exhibits that you can visit across the nation for the week.

▲National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) ‘Geometric Abstraction in Korea’ = The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) is hosting ‘Geometric Abstraction in Korea’, an exhibition that offers a historical overview of geometric abstract art produced domestically from the 1920s to the 1970s at its Gwacheon branch.

Geometric abstract art, which emphasizes the planarity of the canvas through simple and geometric forms like points, lines, circles, and squares, and primary colors, is a trend in painting. In the West, it gained popularity through the works of artists like Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Malevich and emerged as a major trend in modern art throughout the 20th century. In Korea, geometric abstraction appeared in the modern period of the 1920s-30s and spread comprehensively in the 1960s-70s, existing in different forms at major turning points in Korean art history.

However, geometric abstract art was perceived as decorative art or non-Korean abstraction and was considered a peripheral trend compared to other abstract art trends like Art Informel or monochrome painting. This exhibition was planned to illuminate the uniqueness of Korean geometric abstract art and restore its hidden meanings, providing an opportunity to view the history of Korean abstract art from a new perspective.

The exhibition provides an overview of the history of Korean geometric abstract art through about 150 works by 47 representative Korean abstract artists from the 1920s to the 1970s. In particular, it focuses on how geometric abstract art formed intersections with related fields like architecture and design and played a role in expanding the scope of Korean art in connection with changes in contemporary Korean society.

Following the main trends of Korean geometric abstract art by era, the exhibition is divided into five sections. During the exhibition period, related programs such as ‘Expert Lectures and Discussions’ and ‘Curator Talks’ will be held. Experts in art history and design will participate in discussions on the academic significance of Korean geometric abstract art with the theme of ‘Geometric Abstract Art and Design’. The exhibition will run until May 19, 2024, at the MMCA Gwacheon branch located on Gwangmyeong-ro, Gwacheon, Gyeonggi Province.

▲Toby Ziegler Solo Exhibition ‘Broken Images’ = PKM Gallery is hosting a solo exhibition of British contemporary artist Toby Ziegler titled ‘Broken Images’. In this exhibition, which takes place in Korea four years after his last solo exhibition in 2019, the artist presents eight new paintings that flexibly explore the relationship between objects, images, and space, crossing classical art and modern technology.

The artist has focused on the way and speed at which paintings, which have become both original and data through the process of deconstructing the formal elements and meanings of classical art with modern techniques and materials, approach the public. He models the image that will serve as the background in 3D, empties out the original formal features, and then prints smoothly on a canvas that has been painted with gesso and sanded several times. In this way, he goes back and forth inside and outside the printed grid layer with random yet organic brush strokes, intervening in the painting and reassembling the formal elements.

Recently, instead of using hard and smooth aluminum as a support, he has returned to fabric canvas, delving deeper into his unique working method that crosses reason and intuition, figuration and abstraction, analog and digital, while presenting a new landscape of multivalence where the boundaries of originality have collapsed in front of the audience.

Through the exhibition, the artist boldly extracts the painterly elements of classical images using the unreality, a characteristic that digital technology can possess. ‘Broken Images’, the title of the exhibition and the main work of this solo exhibition, originates from a verse in ‘The Waste Land’ (1922) by T.S. Eliot, an American-born British poet. It depicts a desolate image of humanity dried up and desolate due to wars caused by civilization while suggesting a hope for salvation. Following Eliot’s irregular and fragmented rhythm, the artist presents another aura that the broken idols floating like phantoms in the hybridly restructured geometric space can possess as the Holy Grail of the present. The exhibition will run until December 23 at the PKM Gallery on Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul.

▲Han Ji-min Solo Exhibition ‘Wild Garden’ = PageRoom8 presents Han Ji-min’s solo exhibition ‘Wild Garden’ as part of a project highlighting four ‘Monad Printmaking’ artists. Through the artist’s works using excellent linocut techniques formed by delicate lines, it aims to view printmaking as a visual art in its entirety, like the philosophical term ‘monad’, which means the ultimate substance that cannot be divided into anything.

The work starts from images collected from the artist’s surrounding environment. Stray cats that appear anywhere in the city, pigeons pecking at the ground or appearing on the tea road and narrowing unwanted gaps between people. Even nameless weeds living behind countless fences separating tea roads, sidewalks, roads, and buildings. The artist hands over the subjectivity to the street animals and plants that have been strongly tempered in the nature called the city. The ‘artificial nature’ of the city seen from the human perspective becomes their ‘wild garden’. The everyday scenes that the artist finds ‘beautiful’ in this world of ambiguous and dual boundaries do not come as dynamic landscapes, but as images selected according to her visual/sensory taste.

Linocut is the latest plate method among relief printmaking techniques, suitable for simple expressions. Therefore, it may not be suitable for delicate expressions. Nevertheless, the artist says the reason for doing linocut is “because I can do ‘knife drawing’ with very thin lines using a carving knife, I can warp the plate, and above all, I am interested in the process of making the plate and I like the expressed feeling”. The gaze that maintains a sense of balance against force is also connected to the gaze that becomes the theme of the linocut work that the artist creates.

After digging out the linoleum plate coated with black ink three times, the plate becomes both the earth and the garden, like a sealed terrarium. And it waits for the protagonist to invite to this environment that continuously triggers and sustains connections with reality. In the artificial city, it may be nothing more than a pigeon wearing a vinyl hat, but in the wild garden, it can become a splendid creature. Projected like a mirror, the artist’s images based on realism interlock with the paper again, applying pressure to present a reversed image. The exhibition will run until December 10 at PageRoom8 on Bukchon-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul.

Reporter Hee-yoon Kim film4h@asiae.co.kr
<ⓒ투자가를 위한 경제콘텐츠 플랫폼, 아시아경제(www.asiae.co.kr) 무단전재 배포금지>