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NOH SEOK MEE High Street Gallery Please click images above for full view.
June Fitzpatrick Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings and sculpture by the Korean artist, Noh Seok Mee. Born in Seoul, Korea in 1971 Seokmee is a graduate of Hong-lk University. She has exhibited widely in Korea as well as in New York, Tokyo and Berlin. Her work, both lighthearted and complex, uses bright colors and simple forms to tell stories of everyday life. The whimsical acrylic on paper paintings and her playful sculptures have been described as having an overpowering sense of melancholy Noh Seok Mee has illustrated books, and magazine articles and her comic strips have been serialized in numerous publications. In addition she has written and illustrated several of her own books.
YOU ARE S0 BRAVE
Excerpted Maine Sunday Telegram review 11.15.2009 by Philip Isaacson
Noh Seok Mee at June Fitzpatrick Gallery
Korean artist Noh Seok Mee celebrates the mundane and the playful in "you are so brave!," an exhibit of recent work currently on view at June Fitzpatrick's High Street Gallery and in the front window at SPACE Gallery, both praising and challenging the pursuit of meaning beyond simple pleasures. Her brightly colored handcrafted dolls and acrylic paintings are simple but ambiguous, rubbing against an Art Brut aesthetic. Her childlike renderings harbor a gentle madness too sophisticated for the truly naive. Bold washy neon strokes battle a sharp illustrator's line and opaque divisions of space in her paintings, while loud patterned fabrics clash in defining the figures of her dolls. Taken together, the works read like a diary, free-associative narratives capturing gestures of landscapes, playmates, lunches, and resolutions. They also possess a quality of unfamiliarity, as though the artist had heard about her subjects but had never seen them.
Seok Mee's dolls are arranged in display boxes in the gallery, in groups of five to seven. Aesthetically they are a hybrid of a matryoshka and a Henry Darger illustration, but these dolls are pillowy, their forms basic, with limbs tapering at the ends instead of resolving into hands and feet. Apparently genderless and ageless, the dolls range in size and in detail, size suggesting a hierarchy among them, and implying some familial structure. Each doll is the product of a single day, a face remembered by the artist and painted onto the flat fabric, generally emoting surprise or exclamation, pleasant and unsettling.
Seok Mee uses fabrics collected from her travels, and each doll is comprised of two wildly mismatched textiles, the tension between them highlighted by a spectrum of surreal flesh tones: blue complexions and yellow eyebrows, or green hair with pink features. The dolls are painterly when grouped, each box becoming an abstraction of color, like floral arrangements.
Ten page-sized paintings augment the doll displays at June Fitzpatrick Gallery, as brightly hued and offbeat as the figures. Seok Mee's subjects here are swollen and fantastical, quickly captured with a wet brush, and often accompanied by non-sequitur phrases or mantras scrawled in caps. A voluptuous leafy tree with shaggy roots is sketched in green in "a real person," before a chalkier warm gray sky harshly cut off by a translucent pink and orange ground. The title is written at the bottom of the piece in blood red, vibrating against the brighter tones in blocky letters, seemingly unconnected, a sarcastic or playful afterthought.
The titles of the paintings suggest a narrative, often unrelated to the imagery. The context injects the work with humor, a sort of personal inside joke with sources too random for the viewer to nail down. In "rice balls" three cool white igloo-like structures quiver in an arid mustard colored valley, mountains like knuckles in the distance. In "penguin" a chunky gray boulder floats in a fleshy pink waterscape, a spattering of green lichen forms beneath it. While the active brushstrokes on the rock make it somewhat zoomorphic, there is no penguin.
While the references and stories wrapped up in Seok Mee's creations may be out of reach for the viewer, they are clearly present, and their unavailability makes the work that much more provocative. Seok Mee gives full rein to the subjective, unapologetically coding her work without a legend.
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