From the earliest bird goddesses to the space age, some women have refused to be defined by the restrictive gravity of men’s wishes or desires; their ability to fly empowered them to impose conditions on men, or to escape roles they found constricting. – Serenity Young
HESSE FLATOW is pleased to announce Act of Wings, an exhibition of new paintings by the Brooklyn-based artist Annette Hur, marking her third solo presentation with the gallery.
Resonating with her upbringing, a decision to leave South Korea, and women’s movements against patriarchal entitlement and violence, Hur’s striking and tumultuous abstractions combine her visceral dream imagery and the symbolism of traditional Korean painting. Intertwining color and metaphor into images of outstretched wings, Hur poetically mediates between the natural and the constructed. She balances figurative elements with asymmetrical patterns like those found in Hanbok attire, which allude to strife, phases, endurance, and hope.
Bold movements of abstract creatures expand throughout the canvas as Hur carefully coordinates colors with compositional logic to build allegorical narratives teetering between determination and perseverance. In Leaving Without Guilt, a feathery arthropod valiantly takes flight in the quiet hours of dusk or dawn, leaving behind the warm, seductive glow of a picturesque landscape of home. In Look Away, Sky Is On The Other Side, a mother hovers over a dark, consuming body of water, faced with the wrenching decision of abandoning her young in order to avoid being engulfed. In Unstitched Metaphors, red strings corset and constrict a butterfly body whose intricately layered garment doubles as the fabric of its delicate wings, signaling that cultural and personal identities are inextricably linked.
Annette Hur was born in South Korea and currently lives and works in Brooklyn. Recent exhibitions include solo/group exhibitions at Helen J Gallery, Los Angeles; HESSE FLATOW, Shin Gallery, Ross + Kramer, Assembly Room, Wallach Gallery, Columbia University, Gavin Brown Enterprise, RegularNormal, Urban Zen, Times Square Space in New York; Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey; West Chester University in Pennsylvania; Heaven Gallery, Chicago Artists Coalition, Boundary in Chicago. Hur was a nominee for Rema Hor 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.
