"Po Kim & Sylvia Wald: Consorts in Nature"
April 27- May 27, 2006
Gallery Korea at the Korean Cultural Center New York
(460 Park Ave. 6th Floor, New York, NY 10022)
THE GALLERY KOREA OF THE KOREAN CULTURAL SERVICE NY in cooperation with 2X13 GALLERY proudly present PO KIM AND SYLVIA WALD: CONSORTS IN NATURE, from April 27th-May 27th, 2006.
Two receptions will be held for this show the first will take place on April 27th, 2006 between 6-8 PM at 2x13 Gallery, 531 West 26th Street, 4th Floor, New York. The second opening reception will be held at the Korean Cultural Service of NY, Gallery Korea, 460 Park Avenue, 6th Floor, New York on May 12th, 2006 between 6-8PM.
Although Po Kim's and Sylvia Wald's combined bodies of work could easily fill two museum galleries, within the spatial confines of this endeavor we are, nevertheless, able to present a comprehensive and thorough overview of their production highlighting works from their most crucial periods. Furthermore, works seldom seen before such as Kim's Abstract Expressionist works and Sylvia Wald's monoprints, are among those pieces to be collectively highlighted for the first time in New York.
Kim's contributions are considered part of the American cultural heritage having been important to Abstract Expressionism, but his importance to Korean culture is seminal for Kim founded the first art program at Chosun University, Gwangju in South Korea, when returning home in 1946 from studying art in Japan. This artist has painted all his life, beginning in the academic style of his schooling, developing into abstraction in the fifties, and finding his mature style in the abstracted idiom of the last forty years. Jeffrey Wexler, Curator of Asian Art at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers has acknowledged Kim's contributions to American Abstract Expressionism seen in Kim's strong use of color inspired by Korean traditional art and for his ability to render "elegantly developed linear gestures and, more importantly, for his concern for open space." Furthermore, Kim's reputation as an artist working in New York for the past 50 years has placed him in the unique position of meeting, and tirelessly promoting Korean artists in the west.
Wald has always been a socially responsible artist who in the thirties and forties drew images of injustice and oppression for the free press in the hope of redressing these inequities. She drew political illustrations for such publications as Winter Soldiers portraying African Americans sympathetically at a time when lynching was the order of the day. Wald's forties paintings have been seen in the context of American Magic Realism and Surrealism composed of themes of anxiety, alienation with an eerie aspect of fantasy reminiscent of the Neue Sachlichkeit. Since the late forties and early fifties Wald has been acknowledged as an Abstract Expressionist pioneer printmaker who innovated new methodologies considered experimental for that time. Gabor Peterdi in his book Printmaking writes about Wald's "quality and vitality as a developer of a sensitive and personal way of treating the screen print." Harvey Daniels has recognized Wald for her role as a "pioneer printmaker exploiting accidental effects." Wald's works are featured in many national and international collections, among them: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum, in New York, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, and Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, Grunewald Collection Museum, U.C.L.A., Los Angeles, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England.