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Lot Essay
Born in 1967, Lee Kwang-Ho received his B.F.A. and M.F.A. in Painting and Printmaking respectively from Seoul National University. He was awarded numerous noted prizes including Award of Excellence at Contemporary Korean Art Competition in 1995 and has exhibited extensively since. Lee has been included in the "Korean Eye" at the Saatchi Gallery, London, Busan Biennale 2010, and the Prague Biennale 2009, among many other notable international exhibitions. Selected collections include the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul Museum of Art, and Gyunggi Museum of Art in Korea.
Lee Kwang-Ho's fascinating portraits, still lifes, and landscapes from the Inter-View, Cactus to Landscape series transcend the conventional purpose of realistic representation and display a virtuosity of pictorial technique that pushes the boundaries of existing notions of painterly representation. Unlike Lee's other series, his landscapes can be hardly identified, rather they are seemingly random places found in nature everywhere. Devised with many layers of meaning and technique, the two Untitled (Lot 304 & Lot 305) paintings featured here exemplify the way Lee brings the polarity between life and death into the planes of his painting, and his pursuit of themes of nature. In the paintings, Lee emphasizes transience and ephemerality of nature by sensitively capturing the movement of winds somewhere in forests, and between patches of thickets with his enchanting brushstrokes. This kind of his brush technique is reminiscent of Gerhard Richter, one of the most internationally celebrated painters today, but Lee further developed his own landscapes by combining the technique with Buddhist mind and Asian perspective on nature and life.
While Lee intensively explored identity issues and the investigation of the "sameness" and "difference" of individuals in his previous series, he takes a different approach in the Landscape series. As the two Untitled paintings display, here the sceneries depicted in Lee's landscapes lose specificity and individuality due to boldly cropped composition and blurred imagery, becoming common and ordinary. The scenes evoke within the viewer, either lyrical or pastoral, a seemingly neutral, and without personal emotion. It is the result of Lee's intentional pursuit of a void with any distinctive sense of pathos. In his landscapes, Lee is not obviously interested in representing the scene he is painting, but rather occupied with the traditional subjects of old landscape paintings: light, air, and places as background. For Lee, these landscapes are a type of "blank space" in that the actual subjects of these landscapes are not the landscape, but the landscape painting per se.
Lee Kwang-Ho's fascinating portraits, still lifes, and landscapes from the Inter-View, Cactus to Landscape series transcend the conventional purpose of realistic representation and display a virtuosity of pictorial technique that pushes the boundaries of existing notions of painterly representation. Unlike Lee's other series, his landscapes can be hardly identified, rather they are seemingly random places found in nature everywhere. Devised with many layers of meaning and technique, the two Untitled (Lot 304 & Lot 305) paintings featured here exemplify the way Lee brings the polarity between life and death into the planes of his painting, and his pursuit of themes of nature. In the paintings, Lee emphasizes transience and ephemerality of nature by sensitively capturing the movement of winds somewhere in forests, and between patches of thickets with his enchanting brushstrokes. This kind of his brush technique is reminiscent of Gerhard Richter, one of the most internationally celebrated painters today, but Lee further developed his own landscapes by combining the technique with Buddhist mind and Asian perspective on nature and life.
While Lee intensively explored identity issues and the investigation of the "sameness" and "difference" of individuals in his previous series, he takes a different approach in the Landscape series. As the two Untitled paintings display, here the sceneries depicted in Lee's landscapes lose specificity and individuality due to boldly cropped composition and blurred imagery, becoming common and ordinary. The scenes evoke within the viewer, either lyrical or pastoral, a seemingly neutral, and without personal emotion. It is the result of Lee's intentional pursuit of a void with any distinctive sense of pathos. In his landscapes, Lee is not obviously interested in representing the scene he is painting, but rather occupied with the traditional subjects of old landscape paintings: light, air, and places as background. For Lee, these landscapes are a type of "blank space" in that the actual subjects of these landscapes are not the landscape, but the landscape painting per se.