4 SQUARE
October 18 - November 13, 2002
Gallery Korea at the Korean Cultural Center New York
(460 Park Ave. 6th Floor, New York, NY 10022)
Gallery Korea is pleased to announce the presentation of 4 Square, one of a series of
exhibitions formed from art selected by a jury of curators and critics. This year’s jury was comprised of Sabine Rewald, Associate Curator of Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum, Christopher Phillips, Chief Curator of the International Center of Photography, Hyunsoo Woo, Assistant Director of the Japan Society Gallery, David Ebony, Associate Managing Editor of Art in America, and Gerard McCarthy, Curator of Gallery Korea.
The painting and sculpture in this exhibition feature compositional structures derived from straight lines and right angles. Barbara Ellmann creates dynamic images out of nine square panels that are unified by color and design into dynamic compositions. The circles and cruciform image in several of these paintings resembles the complex pictorial structures called mandalas that are used in eastern religions. Evan Read’s crisp, pale colored paintings are derived from his interest in the arbitrary plethora of signage, logos and other designed surfaces that proliferate in the modern world. Antonia Di Giulio creates challenging pictorial spaces with three colors and hard edge geometric shapes. There is a quizzical template-like character to the shapes and an ambiguous relationship between background and foreground and.
Javier Cambre, who was included in this year’s Whitney Biennial will exhibit a rudimentary architectural model that explores the psychological space of right-angled modernist structures. In this sculpture, boxy rooms contain photographs and sound emerges from speakers to recollect the complex influence of apparently “neutral” white spaces. The steel structures made by Lynden Cline also resonate with psychological tension. In one work, she situates a tower of diminishing circular cages on a square platform containing a group of miniature chairs.
Jean Rah and Unju Lee both work with tan colored materials in squares but each produces art with different characteristics. Rah uses square blocks of wood that are facetted and sanded on one surface and joined together in freestanding sculptures and wall reliefs. The shallow spaces and carved images create a tantalizing juxtaposition of the geometric and the sensual. Unju Lee’s cardboard squares are individuated by a variety of marks and subtle touches of color. Circles, lines, and layers are used to create a variegated yet unified aesthetic language.