1 Itaewon-ro 55ga-gil, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, South Korea
Open: Tue-Sat 10am-6pm
Artist: Seung Ah Paik
Gladstone presents Floating Islands, an exhibition of new works by Korean-born artist Seung Ah Paik. The exhibition brings together twelve large-scale, multi-panel paintings from Paik’s ongoing Self Configuration series.
Paik’s paintings take her own body and field of vision as their subject. Working from hundreds of photographs of herself taken from a downward point of view, she brings together multiple first-person views of her body, layering fragments of limbs and torsos into compositions in which boundaries between individual forms become difficult to distinguish. Her face remains absent, as it falls outside her direct field of vision, while her right hand is often missing because it holds the camera.
The works are made on unbleached calico, a material Paik first encountered through fashion draping at Central Saint Martins and has continued to use throughout her practice. Working over charcoal underdrawings, Paik builds the paintings through layered washes, with pigment staining and absorbing into the unprimed fabric rather than sitting on its surface.
Paik describes the development of the works in Floating Islands:
“Floating Islands grew out of my ongoing interest in seeing the body from shifting, multiple viewpoints. In earlier paintings, fragments of the body were often scattered across the surface. Recently, they have begun to gather into denser, more singular forms, making the body harder to read and increasingly uncanny, even monstrous—like islands floating in fields of color.”
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