2008, oil on linen, 75" x 100"
2015, oil on linen, 74" x 80"
The Bowery Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent large paintings by Younghee Choi Martin.
These powerful new works overwhelm with the rigor of their compositions, their color, and their narrative poetry. Martin's highly worked surfaces convey a spirit of suspended spon- taneity that takes years to achieve yet feels simultaneously dense, fresh, intuitive, and expressive. Her process is to continually begin anew by scraping the entire surface, then to draw back in with brush and stick while leaving the visible traces of the prior versions beneath as the richly textured memory of a story lost and found again.
Included in the exhibition are several large paintings with a pastoral motif: Late Summer Afternoon (74” x 80”), Midsummer (61” x 80”), Departure (76” x 71”), Autumnal Rest (76” x 71”), Into the Deep Forest (62” x 61”), Choephori (64” x 49”), Thunder of Spring (75” x 100”). There is a reductive, modernist integration of the figurative and landscape elements in these works. The myths are gener- alized to the point of abstraction and then pulled firmly back into the grand Poussineque tradition (from Giorgione's Fête de Champêtre, to Cezanne's Bathers, with a serious nod to Eilshemius). Through this massive play of shape and color, the narrative is never lost. It breathes through the layers, to slowly reveal a primal vision.
2015, oil on linen, 61" x 80"
Born in Seoul, Korea in 1954, Younghee Choi Martin immigrated to the United States and became a citizen in 1978. Since the mid-1970’s, she has lived and worked in Chelsea, where she was one of the earliest artists to establish a painting studio. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, she has been awarded painting fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the NY CAPS program and her works have been exhibited in New York and throughout the United States, Korea, Japan, France, and Italy. Over 80 of her paintings and drawings are in collections and museums in the United States, Korea, Japan, and India.
For more information,
please contact Bowery Gallery (646) 230-6655 Gallery Hours: Tue – Sat, 11 – 6
Bowery Gallery
530 West 25th Street, 4th Floor New York, NY 10001
