HAERI YOO

Often described as a ‘car crash of fairy tales,’ Yoo here further intensifies her work through tightening her palette of aggressive colours, expanding the paintings’ scale into the monumental and adding texture to surface through gloss and accretion.

Lilly Wei, in a 2007 catalogue published by the Ahl Foundation, describes Yoo’s paintings as ‘wild, emotive, raw, [and] ambitious.’ She further elaborates:

‘Her images are transgressive, sexually fraught, with feminist leanings and psychological twists. They are improvised, spontaneous and indebted to Abstract Expressionism, Neo-Expressionism, graffiti and pop. The boldness of her colour scheme and her rhythmic deployment of paint [brushed] onto the canvas with great gusto is utterly compelling, as are her idiosyncratic figurations. The scale is encompassing and effective in creating a supercharged environment of suspended belief, as you enter her highly imaginative, uninhibited domain with its doubled impact of high feeling and weighty materiality.’

The cultural and aesthetic sensibilities of Yoo’s native Korea as well as psychological tension, outsider art and gestural figuration are all implicit in her work. Organic lines, pencil scrawls, brightly coloured washes and bold patches of paint simplify figures and build accumulations that intervene between humor and sadness, happiness and anger, beauty and violence, abstraction and figuration. If and when they ‘represent,’ these paintings occupy the space unfolding between these dichotomies.