Park Seo-Bo

Private Collection, Asia

Gallery Focus, Seoul

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is cooler and the background has more blue undertones. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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Masterfully blending the inherently Korean colour white and the refined minimalistic qualities of Dansaekhwa, for which Park Seo-Bo is known and revered, Ecriture No. 13-79 is completely engrossing in its assured simplicity. The proclivity for minimalist abstraction in post-war Korea, to which critics have since ascribed the term Dansaekhwa, is nowhere more pertinently manifested than in the powerful purist aesthetic of Park Seo-Bo’s monochrome canvases.  One of the most important artists of the Korean avant-garde, Park Seo-Bo’s paintings have been exhibited at landmark institutions around the globe, including the Musée d'Art Moderne in France, the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, the Singapore Art Museum, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, as well as the Biennale in Sao Paulo, and the Venice Biennale. Furthermore, his works are housed in several acclaimed institutional collections, such as the Fukuoka Museum of Art in Fukuoka, the Seoul Museum of Art in Seoul and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo.

In the wake of the Second World War, the West witnessed a revolution in painting, propelled by a move towards abstraction, and included epoch-defining movements such as Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism. The other side of the globe saw a similar development. In the mid-1950s, a decade after Korea’s 1945 independence from the Japanese, the end of the Korean civil war and the 1953 separation between the North and South, Korea embarked on a period of social rebuilding and cultural regeneration. Adamant to solidify its cultural identity, South Korea saw the birth of its own monochrome abstraction, subsequently coined Dansaekhwa. Literally meaning ‘monochrome painting’, Dansaekhwa works were mostly rendered in neutral hues and are visually comparable to the minimalism pioneered by artists in the US and Europe – Park Seo-Bo’s works in particular recall Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings or Robert Ryman’s crisp minimalist squares. However, in contrast to the purist formalism of Western abstraction, Dansaekhwa appropriated tactile layers of paint, repetitive patterns and organic motifs as means of returning to traditional eastern sensibilities. Considering the Western concept of minimalism in relation to his work, Park Seo-Bo explains that his paintings are in essence “more related to the oriental tradition and its spiritual concept of space. I am more interested in space from the point of view of nature. Even though my paintings may represent an idea about culture, the main focus is always based on nature. In other words, I want to reduce the idea and emotion in my work, to express my interest in space from the view of nature. Then I want to reduce that – to pure emptiness. This has been an old value that still exists in oriental philosophy where nature and men are one” (Park Seo-Bo cited in: Exh. Cat., London, White Cube, Park Seo-Bo, 2016, n.p.).

Ecriture No. 13-79 belongs to Park Seo-Bo’s iconic series of the same name, which the artist began in the late 1960s. French for ‘writing’, Ecriture is a pertinent title for this seminal body of work. Although limited to a monochrome palette, the works’ multiple visceral brushstrokes evoke a vivid notion of texture and establish a lively relief-like surface. In the present work the swooping calligraphic lines approach the boundaries of lexical cognition through visual suggestions of conventional symbols; however, any prescribed attributions of sign referents are ultimately consumed by the dynamic energy of the rhythmic action. The flurry of sweeping-lines which course across the pure white surface of Ecriture No. 13-79 recall the vital scrawls of Cy Twombly. Congruently to Park Seo-Bo, Twombly fully embraced a free association between painting and language and established a distinctly lyrical form of abstraction. Redolent of the expressive charm of Eastern calligraphy, which was believed to convey the universal life force qi – the active source of our true being – Ecriture No. 13-79 purports the aspiration of a meditative state, a truly transcendental experience paradigmatic of Park Seo-Bo’s most powerful work.