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Lot Essay
Three women in traditional Korean clothing are seated likely in the marketplace. Monochromatic colors and a stable geometry of forms enhance the quiet dignity of these women, contributing to an underlying sense of melancholy. The gray color and rough texture, achieved by mixing dry oil with dry material like rice chaff, resemble the granite found everywhere in the Korean countryside. The effect has a soothing, comfortable quality familiar to Koreans. Sookeun's paintings are unassuming and unpretentious, but it is these very qualities, combined with the abstract, simplified rendering of hardworking common folk that give Sookeun's works their timeless power and poetry. His subject matter resonates today with nostalgia for a lost era of Korean history.
At the age of twelve, Park Sookeun encountered a reproduction of Millet's Angelus that made a profound impression on his artistic imagination. At eighteen, he won a prize in the Western Painting section of the 11th government-sponsored Joseon Art Exhibition for a watercolor of farmers in Spring. An oil version of this work gained him entry to the 18th Joseon Art Exhibition in 1939, when he was twenty-four. Self-tutored in art and with only an elementary-school education, Park committed himself to painting in the face of severe financial hardship. He took a job painting portraits of GIs at the PX of the US Eighth Army in 1952 because it paid better than his position as a middle-school art teacher. With his earnings he bought a tiny hut as a studio and continued to participate in sponsored exhibitions. By the mid-fifties his work was attracting a wider circle, including a UNESCO exhibition in San Francisco and group shows in New York and Tokyo. His career was cut short by his premature death from cirrhosis education, Park committed himself to paint
Park Sookeun paintings are unique. His body of work is thought to be small, perhaps no more than four hundred paintings. Modest in scale, somber and roughly textured, they are at first glance unassuming and unpretentious. These very qualities, combined with the abstract, simplified rendering of his idyllic--now iconic--scenes of everyday life, give his work their power and poetry.
Park's work was widely appreciated by Americans stationed in Seoul during the 1960s. Now it is prized by Korean private collectors and institutions and has toured the world in exhibitions of Korean modernism. Founded by an American, the Bando Gallery at the Choson Hotel near the American embassy began exhibiting his paintings in 1955, selling them for nominal sums to clients who were predominantly Americans. Since Christie's, New York, began selling the work of Park Sookeun twenty years ago, he has become the most sought-after modern Korean master.
At the age of twelve, Park Sookeun encountered a reproduction of Millet's Angelus that made a profound impression on his artistic imagination. At eighteen, he won a prize in the Western Painting section of the 11th government-sponsored Joseon Art Exhibition for a watercolor of farmers in Spring. An oil version of this work gained him entry to the 18th Joseon Art Exhibition in 1939, when he was twenty-four. Self-tutored in art and with only an elementary-school education, Park committed himself to painting in the face of severe financial hardship. He took a job painting portraits of GIs at the PX of the US Eighth Army in 1952 because it paid better than his position as a middle-school art teacher. With his earnings he bought a tiny hut as a studio and continued to participate in sponsored exhibitions. By the mid-fifties his work was attracting a wider circle, including a UNESCO exhibition in San Francisco and group shows in New York and Tokyo. His career was cut short by his premature death from cirrhosis education, Park committed himself to paint
Park Sookeun paintings are unique. His body of work is thought to be small, perhaps no more than four hundred paintings. Modest in scale, somber and roughly textured, they are at first glance unassuming and unpretentious. These very qualities, combined with the abstract, simplified rendering of his idyllic--now iconic--scenes of everyday life, give his work their power and poetry.
Park's work was widely appreciated by Americans stationed in Seoul during the 1960s. Now it is prized by Korean private collectors and institutions and has toured the world in exhibitions of Korean modernism. Founded by an American, the Bando Gallery at the Choson Hotel near the American embassy began exhibiting his paintings in 1955, selling them for nominal sums to clients who were predominantly Americans. Since Christie's, New York, began selling the work of Park Sookeun twenty years ago, he has become the most sought-after modern Korean master.