Kwon Young-Woo
1926-2013, South KoreaKwon Young-Woo (1926–2013) was part of the first class to matriculate into the College of Fine Arts, Seoul National University in 1946 and graduated with a BFA in Oriental Painting. In 1957, he graduated with an MFA in Oriental Painting from the same school. He served as a professor at the College of Art, Chung-Ang University, from 1964 to 1978, then moved to Paris, France, in 1978 to fully devote his life to art, living there until 1989.
Kwon’s major exhibitions include the 8th Tokyo Biennale (1965), the 12th São Paulo Biennial (1973), Five Korean Artists, Five Kinds of White (1975) at Tokyo Gallery, a solo exhibition at Jacques Massol Gallery in Paris in 1976, 88 Seoul Olympics: International Contemporary Art Festival (1988) in Seoul, a retrospective at the Ho-Am Art Museum in 1990, the Venice Biennale collateral event Dansaekhwa (2015) at the Palazzo Contarini-Polignac, and When Process Becomes Form: Dansaekhwa and Korean Abstraction (2016) at the Boghossian Foundation in Brussels, Belgium.
The artist received the Artist Award from the Korean Minister of Education and Culture at both the 7th and 8th National Art Exhibitions for his works Seaside Fantasy (1958) and Road to an Island (1959), respectively. He was honoured as the 1998 Korean Artist of the Year and awarded the Silver Crown Medal of the Order of Cultural Merit in 2001. Kwon’s works are in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art; Seoul Museum of Art; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art; and the British Museum in London. Kwon Young-Woo died in Seoul in 2013.
Courtesy Kukje Gallery
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