Press preview: Wednesday 9 March, 11 am - 1 pm.
Jack Bell Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Jeongsu Woo. This will be the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.
The still-life paintings that feature in the Vase series come from another series of Baroque-style still-life work that I produced between 2016 and 2017. After I finished my second solo exhibition ‘The Grave of Books’ at the OCI Museum of Art, I wanted to step away from images that were filled with stories. In the classical still-life, most of the images symbolized something or other, and I wanted to paint only flowers, without other objects there. But rather than emphasizing the beautiful colors and curves of the flowers, I wanted my images to tamp down the conventionally employed ‘flower elements’. I ended up basing my flower paintings on the Dutch still-life, which emphasized death over life. Looking back on it now, I could say that the still-life paintings I used were a form of abstract art to me—since I was focusing my representation on the linear elements and forms of the flower rather than its meaning. The backgrounds of my ‘Vase’ series feature recurring images of simplified landscapes with strong colors. Here, I used my previous still-life paintings as a kind of pictorial device on top of a simplified landscape.
