PAINTINGS
ashes, green carnations, gliding shadows, etc....

For this show, Joyce Kim presents her exploration of ideas in modernism and painting.  Collaged shards of paint seemingly suspended on a background create stark contrast in the works of Joyce Kim strike, not only a note of sobriety and fragility but also a sense of strong presence  by the way in which she incorporates a complex range of vocabulary within painting. By using real “pieces” of paint  (the artist paints on a glass plate, then detaches the paint once dry), like coloured skins that she fixes on her canvases, the artist emphasizes the highly sculptural quality of the works. The artist uses it as means to examine the relationship between art history and painting as a medium that speaks in an unpredictable and subtle way in a contemporary world.
 
While known for her non-traditional, inventive approach to painting, Kim references the  “pure” painting as a physical world of materials in which she finds point of departure for research and a basis for her artistic ideas.  The works in the show share a similar structural interest, process consisting of strategy of contruction, layering and erasure.  The process defines painting as a conceptual vehicle  that accumulates and reflects upon its own ideas past and present, romantic and formal. Culled from art history, film as well as readings in philosphy, the sources of works in the exhibition range from a return to the origins of modernism, Manet, Mondrian – painters on the cusp between figuration and abstraction –  referenced in the works with floral motifs to more recent, abstractly conceived works based on Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 film “Le Samourai”. One of the works in the exhibition is related to Kierkegaard’s writings on aesthetics on the themes of despair and melancholy.  Often the high seriousness of historical ideas in painting are subtended by the whimsical, poetic and elusive depictions that hover between abstraction and figuration in the exhibition.

Joyce Kim creates a visual experience of direct materiality within the language of painting and challenges the viewer with inquiry into the history of painting and contemporary culture.