Pain Patch

Based in Brooklyn, Korean-born artist Haeri Yoo explores ‘humour, sexuality, and the overt and subtle relationships that haunt the space between beauty and violence’. Spectral heads and limbs flicker in and out of focus across her canvases, rendered in thin veils of pigment and applied with the rapid immediacy of calligraphic strokes. Each work is a fantastical vignette born of her own imagination, infusing memories of her childhood in Korea with dark and disturbing nuances. Central to her aesthetic is an extensive preparatory process, in which the image is ‘built up, painted, drawn, pasted and re-shaped from a large repository of smaller explorations’. In Pain Patch, an unsettling scene confronts the viewer: the painting’s rich surface and bright, de Kooning-esque hues appear to harbour a tale of carnage, as stricken faces and body parts emerge from what at first looked like a field of abstract form. ‘Like a child views the world, my work segregates and playfully mutates the realities present’, Yoo explains. ‘Beauty and violence, light and dark are left in an inconclusive disharmonious impasse.’