Intimacy on a large scale
Hyunmee Lee's abstract expressionist works are showcased in 2 galleries
The abstract expressionist paintings of South Korean artist Hyunmee Lee — on display in the Utah Museum of Fine Arts through July 9, as well as Phillips Gallery through April 14 — will enlarge your vision about what great art on a grand scale can do for the soul.
Lee's exhibit at the UMFA, "Intimacy without Restraint," embraces the museum's Great Hall with remarkable confidence. Never before has this enormous hall been so successfully utilized; each of her 12 90-by-90-inch square abstracts is allowed to impress and influence viewers without interference. And each grouping of her more than 100 12-inch square paintings climbs the 50-foot wall with elegant symmetry.
Her show at Phillips, "Outside Sight," gives you another view of the expanse of her brush strokes and her swiftly rendered delicate lines.
Both exhibits are most impressive.
Lee's paintings combine a vast knowledge of and experience in Eastern calligraphic traditions with the gestural impact of modern Western painting; you could say she speaks Kandinsky, Soulages, Motherwell, Kline, Baziotes, Rothko and Twombly with an Asian accent. The result is a harmonious dissertation on space, form and line.
In the 2004 catalog of Lee's show at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University, exhibit curator Frank McEntire wrote:
"Hyunmee usually begins her work by drawing on the canvas, then putting down layers of paint and scumbling and marking the wet surface — but soon shifts to the spiritual explorations that cajole her work into existence."
McEntire also curated Lee's show at the UMFA. "The exhibition title, 'Intimacy Without Restraint,' came from my first impressions of Lee's new paintings," he said.
According to McEntire, Lee's art exudes "sensitivity, empowered by the artist's unrestrained passion for her work and its expression of what she refers to as Ch'I (energy), life force."
Born in Seoul, Korea, in 1961, Lee has been working as an abstract artist for 20 years, taking her inspiration from nature and the subjective self. She received her undergraduate degree at age 24 from the College of Fine Arts, Hong-Ik University in Seoul. Lee then studied six years at the University of Sydney, completed two advanced degrees and then returned to Korea in 1991 to teach at her alma mater.
In 1997, she married fellow Korean, Kyu Lee, and moved permanently to the United States. Eventually they arrived in Utah where her husband would become a practicing architect.
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