Hesse Flatow is excited to present a new body of work by Annette Hur, marking the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.Titled Watching From the Other Side, it will feature varied scales of oil paintings and Korean silk textile-collages.
In recent years image-making has taken on a deeply personal ambit for Hur, as she confronts and reckons with aching memories. Operating from a place of intense psychological complexity, she seeks to translate—as directly and as intuitively as possible—the complex physical and emotional experiences held in her body for years on end. The resulting compositions are confrontational yet alluring, unsettling yet healing, inviting the viewer to meet her in this unguarded space.
In her paintings, Hur deftly fuses disparate forms of image-framing and evocative color palettes, venturing boldly between figuration and abstraction. Straight lines contend with organic shapes and flattened figures; plastic colors interfere with dark forest greens. Forms often appear in a liminal state, at a stage of formation or perhaps in the process of being concealed. In Blue Skirt and Red Thread disjointed, dark shadows foreground bright, assertive strands that unfurl outward, poised to escape from the two-dimensional picture plane. Threaded throughout are fragments of insects and animals, allegorical figures associated with instinct and survival. The full contours of bird wings take up the entirety of the canvas in Drawing Circles (Two Cranes), while in Wings and Our Collective Bodies, insect wings have morphed into graphic incarnations. In each, Hur strikes a precarious balance that conveys a sense of visceral urgency. Gestural and immediate, they give rise to intense, ponderous sensations.
During the pandemic intimate mixed-media work emerged as an crucial component of Hur’s studio practice, as she invested in formal invention and beauty in small 12 x 9 inch surfaces. Made from deconstructing her own Korean silk dresses and repurposing discarded textiles, her collages evoke a sense of fragility and restoration while creating a reminiscent relationship to paintings through reference to the body, layers, colors and psychological connotations.
Annette Hur was born in South Korea and currently lives and works in Brooklyn. Recent exhibitions include Hesse Flatow, New York; Ross + Kramer, New York; Regular Normal, New York; Assembly Room, New York; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York; Urban Zen, New York; Wallach Gallery, New York; Times Square Space in New York; Fairleigh Dickinson University, New Jersey; West Chester University, Pennsylvania; Heaven Gallery, Chicago; Chicago Artists Coalition, Chicago; and Boundary, Chicago. Hur was a nominee for Rema Hort Mann Grant in 2019, a resident of BOLT Residency at Chicago Artists Coalition in 2016–2017. Hur holds a BA from Ewha Women's University (2008), BFA (2015) from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and MFA (2019) from Columbia University.
