GUK DAEHO Solo Exhibition

Guk Daeho has been digging into fundamental problems of paintings before he started his oil paintings of scenes that seem like blurry photographs taken by amateurs who could not get correct focus. As the artist studied in Korea and France, Guk has explored the problems of flatness and representation of canvas created by movements of brushes, the relationship between three-dimensional physical object and space, the problems of colors, etc. which has lead him to his today’s paintings.When Guk traveled to New York, Paris and many cities of Italy, he took photos of city sceneries that made impressions to him. Some of the sceneries are famous landmarks of the city, but also Guk’s photos of coincidently caught by the artist’s sight such as a corner of a narrow back street or a window of an apartment, a site of underground pass-way or passing cars and walking people are found often. Especially the artist gets caught by the atmosphere of everyday life at unusual place and mysteriousness of colors.

Guk’s painting process is by recalling his personal place of memory taken in photos and he uses the photos as resources for his image representation paintings. Whoever visits his studio will notice that he is an artist who sits in front of a white canvas, and thinks, and plans, and starts working; such character is also shown in his way of creation. By such way, the places in Guk’s memory are recalled one by one, by countries and by cities and they come out toward us.

​

In fact in modernism painting history, artists confronted and followed photography both. Impressionism artists did expressed subjects’ of a moment, did used snappiness of snap photos, meaning, though they tried to keep distance to photography because they thought that photography was threatening them, they adopted the revolutionary composition of photography at the same time. Also, photo-realism artists challenged themselves for ultimate precise representativeness of photography and pursued to overcome mechanic realism of photography and to achieve surrealistic painting effects.Guk Daeho himself also, photography does important role in his creation process. The artist goes through processes such as capturing and keeping images, and interpreting, etc. The sceneries in the artist’s canvases are of where the artist used to live or where he traveled which are received as everyday life scenery for audience, but for the artist, they are representations of a merged particular time and place from his memory. This is where the artist needs a device to create common area between the artist’s subjective experience’s particularity and audience’s objective visual experience.Partial Bokeh(blurry) effects, the technique that makes images blurry, transform subjectively viewed exotic city sceneries by the artist into general images and make the communication with audience smoother. Guk’s works to be exhibited this time are representations of many cities of Italy; not only the fresh compositions but also thorough dessins and outstanding colors, skilled techniques of the artist that provide imaginations take away not only eyes of audience but also their hearts.