Younghee Choi Martin: Recent Paintings (2018)

Bowery present large narrative paintings by Younghee Choi Martin, who revisits Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy in a series of fiercely reworked compositions. Vibrant in color and forceful in drawing, these canvases update, in decidedly modernist fashion, the intensity and lyrical expressiveness of the classical dramas.

Specific scenes have been generalized almost to the point of abstraction, then pulled firmly back into a tradition that reaches from Poussin to Rubens and the Bathers of Cézanne. In these paintings the weather, light and landscape forms become painterly manifestations of the will of the gods and their propensity for both uplifting and afflicting the human spirit.