Gallery Shchukin proudly announced today the opening of its major spring exhibition “Hwang Young-Sung: painting beyond the grid”. Curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, the exhibition marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States. It comprises more than 50 paintings and works on paper spanning the last three decades of Hwang’s prolific career. As part of the exhibition, a series of collage works from the 1990s is being exhibited for the first time.
Born in 1941, Hwang has been one of Korea’s most prominent modernist painters and leading scholars. Having spent most of his artistic career in Gwangju, home for one of the world’s most significant Biennials, his works have been featured in numerous solo exhibitions throughout Asia and Europe, and are included in several museum collections such as the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, the Ho-Am Museum and the Hansol Foundation of Culture.
Hwang’s work is distinguished in its progressive development of visual idioms that synthesize various influences ranging from Korean sculpture and Native American painting, to European High-Modernism. Hwang’s paintings function like visual diaries where personal memories and cultural references are distilled into hieroglyph-like pictograms. They encapsulate a wide array of personal stories and collective narratives.
In describing the concept behind the show, curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath explained: “The exhibition is centered around Hwang’s grid paintings, in which he reinvents the theme of the grid to tell entirely unique narratives. Moreover, the grid functions as an analogy of the confined structures of power underscoring the writing of art history.”
Gallery owner Nikolay Shchukin stated, “We are pleased to be showing the work of Hwang Young-Sung to the New York audience. Hwang is one of Korea’s most important artists and we are honored to present this major survey of his work in our gallery.”
A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition. It includes a curatorial essay elaborating the conceptual framework of the exhibition and contextualizing the art-historical, and a conversation between the artist and the curators giving a firsthand account of the philosophy behind the selected works.