JONGSUK YOON

Born in South Korea in 1965, Yoon relocated to Europe in the early 1990s to study art at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under German conceptual artist Fritz Schwegler. After her studies, she settled in Düsseldorf and focused her practice on drawings and paintings that hover in the space between figuration and abstraction. In works on paper, canvas, as well as directly on walls, Yoon creates charged and dreamlike color field landscapes that reflect her interests in both European and American Modernism and East Asian traditions.

For this exhibition, two expansive, mural-sized paintings April Mai (2023) and June (2024) are presented in the Main Gallery. Featuring poetic silhouettes of mountainscapes, they reference the border between North and South Korea, as well as the artist’s own childhood memories. Across a vast and mesmerizing pictorial space, Yoon’s unique approach to painting is found in atmospheric layers of highly gestural and variously textured brushstrokes. The colors, a rich palette of bright yellows, soft fushias, and pale blues, are also references to specific memories, such as azalea blossom-covered mountains in the Korean springtime. The disembodied forms of color present this profoundly fraught geopolitical terrain as an anti-monumental, illusory reverie.

Also on view are a series of smaller paintings in oil and drawings in gouache on paper. The repetitive act of Yoon drawing and painting the same imagined space, as she herself has never been to this site, becomes a ritualistic aspect of the work that recalls meditative practices. Further, within a single work, we find the repeated, graphic marks of Yoon’s brush, at times thickly applied, and others so light that they become a window to the texture of the bare canvas. As described by the artist in 2022:

“When I paint larger works with larger brushes, giving myself to the brushwork comes naturally. In those moments where the brush moves across the surface, I am there, in a different world.” – Jongsuk Yoon, 2022

Yoon is currently the subject of the solo exhibition Kumgangsan at Mumok (Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation) in Vienna, Austria. Past select solo exhibitions include, amongst others, Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover (2021); Nordiska Akvarellmuseet, Skärhamn (2020); Wall Paintings, Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2018); Museum Kurhaus Kleve (2017); and Osthaus Museum, Hagen (2015)