December 13 - 29, 2000

Gallery Korea at the Korean Cultural Center New York
(460 Park Ave. 6th Floor, New York, NY 10022)

Lisa Breslow
Jayne Holsinger
Min A Kim
Hee Joung Kwon
William Steiger

Gallery Korea is pleased to announce the opening of Stark Narrative on December 13th. This exhibition of paintings and video will continue until December 29th. The imagery in this exhibition is inflected with the hint of a story, aspects of an event and the mystery of place.
Jayne Holsinger depicts members of family gathering in the dark around a bonfire. Her careful, vivid painting imbues the ordinary with the idiosyncratic. These pictures are enlarged from photographs and large overexposed areas are used to dramatic effect. Hee Joung Kwon also makes pictures from photographic images but her snapshots come from the urban, public space of a city. The figures stand, walk and sit in oblique relationship with each other and there is the sense of movement, of people looking before speaking or just watching and passing by.

William Steiger paints architectural structures that recall the engineering achievements and technological ambition of an industrial era. His linear style creates perspective views that dazzle the eye in ways that recollect the impressive effect of the cast iron engineering. Lisa Breslow's landscapes are suffused with the misty light of pastoral fantasy. The surfaces of these delicate compositions are scraped by the artist’s deft work with a palette knife and indicate transformations of opaque material into illusory space.

The video films of Min A Kim record basic actions that are built up through repetition and variation into cohesive narrative structures. In one short film a ball bounces down a stair well in a haphazard but regular descent. There is the trace of a story or the shadow of history either personal or public evoked in the different works in this exhibition.