KIAF Seoul Sep 4-8, 2024​
Kimart together with the Lechbinska Gallery presented for the 21st edition of Kiaf SEOUL a group exhibition exploring landscape across the mediums and traditions.
Featuring works of photography and painting that operate between and beyond the poles of abstraction and figuration, our presentation invited viewers to engage with landscape as a genre with new perspectives. Each artists featured interrogates the concept of the landscape, offering sui generis interpretations: as a trace of time; as a mirror reflecting the past; as a dialogue with the infinite; as lens by which to address climate change; and as a means to awaken hidden emotions.
With a pronounced focus on the interiority of landscapes, the artworks in this presentation collectively demonstrate the capacity of landscapes to mediate the human experience with time and nature.​
Annelies Štrba, Cécile Wick, Hyunae Kang und Ursula Palla​
In the past few years Annelies Štrba's photographs have explored a dreamlike world whose protagonists seem almost like fairies. Her carefully constructed images bring us to a fantastic world that is similar to dreams whilst taking real daily environment as their setting. Her photographs that capture the psychological experience, the moment when a memory is transformed into a picture, are often printed on canvas to further enhance their painterly qualities. Cécile Wick's photography is characterized by its analog sensibilities. By experimenting with different historical photographic technics such as graphics, heliogravure, and inkjet printing she's exploring various possibilities in photographic expressions. Her landscape series "Islands", in a manner of complex heliogravure technic maximizes the emotion and character of analog photography through extraordinary color scheme. Renowned for her poetic sculptures, media art, and immersive video installation Ursula Palla developed her artistic praxis that focuses on nature not only in all its glory and beauty, but also something that can easily disappear and forgotten. The aspect of fragility and ephemerality is paradoxically emphasized by the hard, metallic materiality of her sculptures, which strangely appear extremely delicate. Hyunae Kang's unique style, which captures the dynamism and dazzling colors of nature, began with her sculptural work of the 1990s as a restrained expression of the ‘inner energy’ of materials by means of textural accumulation. While some works draw their imagery from the infinitely varied motions of nature (such as ridges and waves), and place these in relation to distinctly abstract elements, most are dominated by ‘classical’ geometric shapes reminiscent of the larger celestial and philosophical realms of the sun, moon and void.
Cécile Wick, Island III, Heliogravure on paper, 30 x 20 cm, 2005
Cécile Wick, Island VI, Heliogravure on paper, 30 x 20 cm, 2005