Annette Hur: Willful Unknowing

Hesse Flatow is pleased to announce Annette Hur’s solo debut exhibition, Willful Unknowing, an exhibition of new large-scale paintings. 

Annette Hur’s Willful Unknowing is a triumph over trauma. The images in her works are intuitive, from memories that imprint a kind of body knowledge for the artist. Her paintings create stories that exist solely on an emotional level but that feel more real than reality. The metaphorical use of insects, animals, and nature delves into the expressive power of the simplest apparatus of a living human body: instinct, intuition, fear, survival. 

Hur demonstrates this with hyper color-filled large-scale oil paintings that flex between abstract and recognizable forms, such as a falling rabbit, flowers, butterflies or an ominous dark cloud. The surface vibrates frenzied energy which demands the eye to crawl over every inch, as if going through all the details of a certain event. She commands time with these works, speeding up between fast fluid fields of color and halting to a stop with determined delineating marks as if drawing a line in the sand.

These works are large enough to consume your full view, then the images break down as the fine patched details draw you in, devouring your first perception while leaving you to sort this myriad of puzzled parts. The body is either camouflaged or shredded into the background evoking a sense of crisis and precarious transitional time. It is volatile with an effort to be active over things in which it could not be before. These paintings engage in an internal dialogue with the body’s desire to reveal and unfold perpetual stories of the competing imperatives that we carry as a living body: vulnerability and fear.