Nature Reflection

Nature and the big city are important reference points for Korean painter, architect and landscape artist Kejoo Park (born 1956 in Seoul). In her art, which is in the style of informal painting, she is less concerned with composition and more with inner feelings, which she expresses with intensity and impulsiveness. She describes her artistic impulses as “inner energies”, which are always constrained by an external element. This external factor can be architecture, such as that of the city of Frankfurt. Having grown up in South Korea, Kejoo Park studied painting and landscape architecture at Harvard University in Cambridge, New York. After a stint in Switzerland, she now lives in Frankfurt am Main. She perceives her living environment as both an influencing and constraining factor.

The skyline of the banking district serves as a backdrop for her paintings, depicted through photographs where ordered structures seem to emerge through a gauzy curtain of transparent gray-white paint swirls. The dualistic principle in Kejoo Park’s painting can also represent her own positioning between Western and Far Eastern lifestyles, the contrast between nature and humanity, city and countryside, or more fundamentally, the inside and outside, which confronts us in the images through contrasting black and white and interwoven brush structures. In her thinking, Kejoo Park is closely aligned with Taoist philosophy, which is based on the idea of unity with nature – where contemporary alienation occupies her in her work. In her new series “The Song of the Earth,” the artist references the polarity of life and transience in the life perception of composer Gustav Mahler, which is musically expressed in his eponymous song cycle. Mahler set to music adaptations of ancient Chinese poetry by Hans Bethge. Park’s large-format diptychs in mixed media connect Mahler’s melancholy with a Far Eastern landscape perspective and a calligraphic sensibility.

Gallery Rieder | Maximilianstr. 22 | until January 26
Tuesday to Friday, 11 AM – 1 PM, 2 PM – 6 PM; Saturday 11 AM – 3 PM