HUR Kyung-Ae

About her Art Featuring bright colours, yet poetically reserved in their tone, Hur Kyung-Ae’s unmistakable artworks stretch the usual boundaries between painting and sculpture. Each of her works resonates with the joy of life. Her paintings feature an array of colours in a sensual and expressive complexity, yet they are made to align to a systematic order. The multicoloured layers of paint often emerge from the ground, or more precisely, from under the colour that covers the multiple coats of paint, revealing a small portion here and there, thus generating colourful and flickering surfaces that are nevertheless imbued with a meditative atmosphere. These objects attest to the process of their creation, the joy of making them: they are the products of the human hand forming them and allowing them to take shape in the creative process, without preliminary planning. Construction and deconstruction are the characteristic phases in this process: scraping off and cutting into the carefully built up coats of paint, the artist enjoys the unexpected results. It is an activity full of excitement, yielding surprises. The artworks reveal wonderment at the world, and a sense of joy arising in its wake. When a work has been completed, most artists set about removing any unwanted drips and smears of paint, and waste. Hur Kyung-Ae, however, has chosen a completely different path: she collects the fallen dust of paint and the dry strips of the layers that she has scraped off, and reuses them: she re-pastes them onto the surface of the painting. By doing so, she connects to the train of thought that she has read in Didi-Huberman’s “Genius of Non-place”: the artist inhabits a place, i.e., in her case, the canvas and the world comprised of the layers coating the canvas, which she gradually deconstructs and abolishes. The work, however, preserves all the traces of abolishment and transformation. The artist points to this fact by re-introducing the fallen layers of paint. She addresses th Show more