Eel-Kwon Kim

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Eel-Kwon Kim says of his work: “My images are full of the vibe of representational minimalism; they are not in their flatness to be read as formal exercises but rather as themes loaded with content inspired by nature and are also sources of emotions to apprehend with sobriety, a minimalist perception of nature. »

Eel-Kwon acknowledges the influence   of Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt in his work, but unlike them, who excluded any form of figuration, it is indeed stylized, phantasmatic horizons that Eel-Kwon Kim paints, spectral horizons , blurred by a sfumato suggesting an emerging structure.

 

Kim's paintings evoke humid landscapes, such as Suncheon Bay where he lives, a refuge for migratory birds made of marshes, subject to the tides of the neighbouring ocean.

 

Eel-Kwon KIM explains that under the darker horizon of the bay, its variable islands draw the ambiguous limit between land and sea as a metaphor for metaphysical apprehension, recalling the Korean "Han", the feeling of sorrow  and resentment, quite close to our Baudelairian Spleen, a horizon separating space, the uncertain earth, from a twilight sky, a blurred horizon which is also semantic overlap between  the figurative and the abstract. But above this horizon Eel-Kwon KIM invites us through the choice of his colours and the proportions of the sky to “rise towards a serene peace”.

Eel-Kwon Kim was born in 1962, he is a professor at Chon Nam University in Gwangju, a Master of Fine Art (MFA) the New York Academy of Art Graduate School, and a PhD from So Gang University, Seoul, The Graduate School of Communication Art. Media Art Ph.D. He has participated in three hundred collective and worldwide solo exhibitions. His art is actively traded on Christie’s and a dozen other platforms.