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May 29 - July 12, 2008

Oh ChiGyun: Defining Landscape Curated by Raúl Zamudio

Oh ChiGyun: Defining Landscape is a one-person show that surveys one of Korea's premier artists. The exhibition brings together many works from a growing corpus that spans close to two decades of artistic activity. Oh ChiGyun was born in Chungnam, South Korea in 1956, and many things differentiate his art from that of his peers in both his native country and abroad, including an individual style that borrows from art historical precedence and is coupled with contemporary innovation. Some of the things that distinguish Oh ChiGyun's approach to painting are his strong yet sensitive palette, pictures that are highly textured from pigment being amply applied to their surfaces, and his use of other support material other than canvas including found and discarded doors and windows. But the most unique aspect of Oh ChiGyun's art is his technique in which he applies paint to his pictures directly with his hands rather than by brush. Oh ChiGyun's idiosyncratic métier creates an immediacy and intimacy between imagination, subject matter, and artistic execution. The paintings presented here and that evince this eclectic, aesthetic sensibility were made in various locales including New York City and South Korea. Oh ChiGyun's depictions created in these geographically and culturally disparate places portray a wide range of humanity and nature including city scenes, county vistas, Arcadian-like landscapes rife with flora and fauna as well as everyday activities such as dog-walking. Oh ChoGyun's thematic of what is ostensibly the quotidian is compelling in its imagistic power to evoke a plethora of emotions that span the breadth of human experience. As the paintings and the exhibition presented here make quite clear, then, is that life in general shapes Oh ChiGyun's art which, in turn, becomes integral to the way he artistically defines his subject matter including the city, its inhabitants, and, of course, the landscape.

History

Miotte Foundation

The Chelsea Art Museum is also the Home of the Miotte Foundation, which is dedicated to archiving and conserving the oeuvre of Jean Miotte and providing new scholarship and research on L’Informel. Miotte’s extensive collected works are preserved as a legacy for New York, where he has had a studio in SoHo since 1978.

The art of Informel (or Informal Art) had an important role in the European and American post-war art scene, and Miotte was an early proponent. Meaning “formless,” or “away from form,” Informel is related to Abstract Expressionism, but seeks to strip away all reference to representation, and to become a new kind of international language.

Miotte (b.1926) has exhibited regularly since 1952. He first arrived in New York in 1961 with a Ford Foundation cultural exchange grant, and after a period of work and travel throughout the U.S. he had his first New York one-man show in 1962 at Alexander Iolas. Later his work was exhibited by the Martha Jackson and Gimpel & Weitzenhoffer galleries.

Miotte describes abstract painting as “a voyage through the 20th century”—revealing at once an experience of alienation and yet breaking through barriers of nationalism to create a wholly international language. Within his framework of gestural abstraction, Miotte continues to grow, fighting repetition, pushing at the boundaries of the gestural mark of paint on canvas. Miotte is represented in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, and numerous other major museums in the U.S., Europe and Asia. In 1980 he was the first Western painter invited to exhibit in post-Mao Bejing.