HANNA HUR

Each new work in Annunciation contains a base layer of thinned black paint, applied in brushstrokes thatseem to ebb like water or scattered clouds against a darkened sky. That rhythmic ground is then plottedwith a rectilinear grid, coupling the biomorphic and geometric modes that abstraction tends to cleave apart.What looks immaculate from a distance begins to waver on close inspection—the drag of pencil against thetooth of raw canvas divulging the hand at work. The final layer belongs to the image, which the disciplineof patterning brings to light. Hur’s Angel paintings exemplify the “rational mysticism” for which she isknown, transected by horizontal bars that spread like wings from a central spine of halfmoon arcs. Theworks’ two- and four-panel formats stem from her deep interest in doubles—the burgeoning prospects ofmore-than-one. Another diptych, Suspension, veils the pictorial field in a wash of lapis blue: a pigment sovaluable that Renaissance painters reserved it for the Virgin’s mantle.

That veil recurs in a pair of works that silhouette an absent Madonna, lifted from Antonello da Messina’sfifteenth-century Virgin Annunciate. Annunciation scenes depict that rare moment when the divine isproximate to the human world, and Hur has long been fascinated with such sublime transmissions.Antonello flouted the genre’s conventions by removing the angel Gabriel, training the composition solelyon Mary as she learns her fate. Hur installs her twinned paintings on axis to charge the space betweenthem, grounding their visions in the spatial coordinates of a given architecture. This sensitivity to place isheightened in the exhibition’s only drawing, with a tremulous slit that radiates out from a sketch of theroom in which it hangs. To stand before these works is thus to occupy the threshold state that attends theirmaking, poised between material fact and revelation.