Lot 141
  • 141

PARK YUNGNAM | Landscape Against Blue Sky

Estimate
300,000 - 500,000 HKD
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Description

  • Landscape Against Blue Sky
  • acrylic on canvas
  • 240 by 170 cm; 94½ by 67 in.
signed and titled in Korean and dated 2010 on the reverse

Provenance

Private Collection, Korea

Catalogue Note

I hope my painting is made, rather than me making the work. I wish that the created were Utopia. Furthermore, I wish that world of Utopia were a world of limitless beauty.

Park Yungnam


Utopia of Limitless Beauty

Mesmerizing and meditative, the monumental Landscape against Blue Sky is archetypal of Park Yungnam’s entrancing oeuvre of abstract dreamscapes that are executed not with brushes but with the artist’s bare fingers. For Park, stretching his fingertips across a canvas to rub, smear and spread pigment is akin to spreading his fingers within the earth of nature – an extension of the primitive free play he engaged in when he was child. Adhering to an artistic modus operandi of simplicity and child-like purity, Park starts painting at sunrise and stops at sunset, creating canvases that emanate the enthralling auras of nature and light. The artist declares poetically:”I hope my painting is made, rather than me making the work. I wish that the created were Utopia. Furthermore, I wish that the world of Utopia were a world of limitless beauty". Park further believes that “colours are forms”, i.e. that natural forms come into existence via the power of mere colour and abstraction, without any need for or attempt to engage in representative figuration. Manifesting precisely this belief, Landscape against Blue Sky’s tender earth and sky tones immerse viewers within a vast world of gentle innocence and forgotten delights – with colour alone, a whole universe beckons. Born in 1949 in Seoul, Korea, Park Yungnam graduated from the Art College of Seoul National University in 1973 and pursued further studies in New York, receiving his MFA from the City College of New York in 1983. The artist has since held solo exhibitions in Korea, France and the United States, and his works have been exhibited at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, the Seoul Museum of Art, the Sungkok Museum in Korea, and The City of Stuttgart Museum in Germany.