The single brushstroke as a horizon between heaven and earth is the second solo exhibition by Hyun-Sook Song at Zeno X Gallery.

Hyun-Sook Song was born in 1952 and grew up in a mountain village in Korea. In 1972 she travelled to West Germany and soon after that she began to draw and to paint. In doing so she often gave voice to her nostalgic memories of her beloved motherland. Over several decades she created paintings with only a handful of motifs or themes: clay pots, silk ribbons draped around posts, or woven textiles hung on a thread.

Song developed both a very distinctive style and a technique that blends elements from the West and the East. She chose to use tempera, a type of paint made by mixing pigments with egg yolk. This technique was widely used in Western painting in the Middle Ages, notably because of the paint’s opaque character. Song, by contrast, uses tempera in a way that is almost transparent: the brushstrokes are economical but accurate. Each brushstroke represents a single movement and there is no room for doubt.

Her artistic outlook has been heavily influenced by Eastern philosophy and calligraphy but also by her love of nature, the body and her materials. She sees painting as a performative happening. She places the stretched canvas on the floor of her studio and balances above the painting on a simple wooden plank that is placed above it. In doing so she is in a state of utter concentration and meditation. The intensity of the painting enables her to work for only a few hours per day. This does not prevent her from going to the studio every day to maintain her dexterity.

Although her formal language may be limited, the variations appear endless. The works can be approached from both an abstract-meditative perspective and a figurative-symbolic viewpoint. The ‘wooden poles’ refer to a simple form of shelter, while the fabrics often suggest the age-old tradition of ramie weaving in the region of her birth. The paint that thins out as the line progresses symbolizes the finiteness of life and the dying out of hope.

East Asian painters perceive the landscape very differently from Western artists. In the West, we are generally in the habit of seeing figurative painting as a window on the world and in a linear perspective, while artists in the East still see themselves as an integral part of this landscape. In the West, distinct brushstrokes are generally rendered invisible, while to East Asians the brushstroke is precisely the crucial and central element. A brushstroke is the ultimate proof of the painter’s inner peace (or turmoil) and is always expressive. In addition, the brushstroke is always unique because the relation with the surface, the scale and the light is always different. Further proof of the importance of the brushstroke in Song’s oeuvre is the fact that her titles are based on the number of movements that she needed to complete the work. Hyun-Sook Song’s works can be compared to haiku: short and simple but very powerful in terms of content.

Hyun-Sook Song studied at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg between 1976 and 1981. In 1984 she returned to her homeland for a year to study Korean art history at Chonnam National University in Gwangju.

Her work has been shown at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, the Gwangju Museum of Art, the Poznan Biennal, the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the Berkeley Art Museum in San Francisco, the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg and at many more locations.

Hyun-Sook Song was born in 1952 and grew up in a mountain village in Korea. In 1972 she travelled to West Germany and soon after that she began to draw and to paint. In doing so she often gave voice to her nostalgic memories of her beloved motherland. Over several decades she created paintings with only a handful of motifs or themes: clay pots, silk ribbons draped around posts, or woven textiles hung on a thread.

Song developed both a very distinctive style and a technique that blends elements from the West and the East. She chose to use tempera, a type of paint made by mixing pigments with egg yolk. This technique was widely used in Western painting in the Middle Ages, notably because of the paint’s opaque character. Song, by contrast, uses tempera in a way that is almost transparent: the brushstrokes are economical but accurate. Each brushstroke represents a single movement and there is no room for doubt.

Her artistic outlook has been heavily influenced by Eastern philosophy and calligraphy but also by her love of nature, the body and her materials. She sees painting as a performative happening. She places the stretched canvas on the floor of her studio and balances above the painting on a simple wooden plank that is placed above it. In doing so she is in a state of utter concentration and meditation. The intensity of the painting enables her to work for only a few hours per day. This does not prevent her from going to the studio every day to maintain her dexterity.

Although her formal language may be limited, the variations appear endless. The works can be approached from both an abstract-meditative perspective and a figurative-symbolic viewpoint. The ‘wooden poles’ refer to a simple form of shelter, while the fabrics often suggest the age-old tradition of ramie weaving in the region of her birth. The large diptych Brushstrokes - Diagram #II is a tribute to the Korean school children who died in a major shipping disaster in 2014. The paint that thins out as the line progresses symbolizes the finiteness of life and the dying out of hope.

East Asian painters perceive the landscape very differently from Western artists. In the West, we are generally in the habit of seeing figurative painting as a window on the world and in a linear perspective, while artists in the East still see themselves as an integral part of this landscape. In the West, distinct brushstrokes are generally rendered invisible, while to East Asians the brushstroke is precisely the crucial and central element. A brushstroke is the ultimate proof of the painter’s inner peace (or turmoil) and is always expressive. In addition, the brushstroke is always unique because the relation with the surface, the scale and the light is always different. Further proof of the importance of the brushstroke in Song’s oeuvre is the fact that her titles are based on the number of movements  that she needed to complete the work.

Hyun-Sook Song’s works can be compared to haiku: short and simple but very powerful in terms of content.

Hyun-Sook Song studied at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg between 1976 and 1981. In 1984 she returned to her homeland for a year to study Korean art history at Chonnam National University in Gwangju. Hyun-Sook Song is also active as a documentary maker. Her work has been shown at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, the Gwangju Museum of Art, the Poznan Biennale, the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the Berkeley Art Museum in San Francisco, the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg and at many more locations.

Hyun-Sook Song’s work is included in the collections of the following institutions: Kunstmuseum Bern, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, Leeum-Samsung Museum of Modern Art, Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Seoul Museum of Art, Gwangju Art Museum and Gyeonggido Museum of Art.

At this moment, we leave the frame of the gallery program and go off road to present work by eight artists that are invited for the first time. The selection of these artists was not made to fit any particular concept. Along the way, we travelled around the world to meet the artists who sparked our interest, in their studios. Although we met many artists, at a certain point we noticed that some artists shared a mutual interest in topics dealing with language, space, abstraction and the body.  The show ‘Architecture of Life’, curated by Lawrence Rinder at the Berkeley Art Museum in San Francisco provided a clearer direction to our focus. The title of this exhibition encompasses the idea of the architecture of the body, mind, spirit and society but also the architecture of matter, energy and form.

Every artist has a unique way of communicating his or her thoughts and feelings. Although much can be said in words, they often feel more comfortable expressing themselves through painting, sculpture, drawing, installations and videos. This results in a personal vocabulary and a visual alphabet. The traditional categorization based on a utilized medium is becoming increasingly more polysemous. Many artists today are crossing boundaries and adopt a hybrid practice and identity.

We would like to thank all the artists for their generosity and enthusiasm, as well as for participating and making available a selection of beautiful works for the show.

Following is an introduction to each participating artist:

URI ARAN

b. 1977, Jerusalem – lives and works in New York

Uri Aran’s work combines drawing, sculpture, collage, text, printing and video. With and through these various elements, he constructs a fluid system of motifs and signifiers. In his work, he examines intersecting themes of genre, gesture and artifice – both as they occur in art and in everyday reality.

In his sculptural works, Aran creates intricate and layered arrangements of symbols, objects and associations – an elaborate language or iconography that resists straightforward decipherment.  He himself refers to his assemblages as “a storyboard that might have been taken apart and reorganized in different pieces”. Aran frequently utilizes everyday materials – each of his objects becoming a sculptural readymade – so as to disassociate them from their typical contexts. His disparate items seem to invite radical new functions or possibilities: denuded of a surrounding narrative or context, they enter into a state of free associative play.

Aran describes his works as being based on a kind of “flat logic” (belying their seeming arbitrariness), comparable to how a configuration of objects on a tabletop can be used to indicate routes and landmarks as an improvised means of giving directions. His wall pieces frequently bring together processes of drawing, painting and sculpture: assembled shapes and textures massed together into a synchronic ‘landscape’. Incorporating various media and alternating between printed and drawn markings, or gestural and graphic icons, these works mirror the chains of signifiers and syntactical ‘parcels’ that constitute language. And yet, as in his sculptural work, hierarchies of meaning are being radically destabilized or flattened. We come to project personal associations or emotions onto their free-floating elements; as the critic and curator Fionn Meade has observed: “Aran constructs a shape-shifting language with the most meager means, collecting an uneasy inventory of pathos, absence, and laughter.”

“The discord of meaning in language is something I’m interested in”, the artist explains.  “I don’t know if it’s because English is not my mother tongue; I see a delay of meaning. I see things as mediated—almost everything is quoted.” In contrast to the order, regularity and declarative meaning of a letter, his works confront us with inchoate landscapes – visual and verbal, immediate and mediated: “The interest for me is not in creating confusion. I am managing rather than “taming” the stutters, ticks and stammers that jolt along through the processes of thought and emotional response. I am making them visible.”

Uri Aran graduated from Columbia University in 2007, and has since exhibited internationally in many major solo presentations at Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne (2016) Peep-Hole in Milan (2014), South London Gallery in London (2013), Kunsthalle Zürich. He has been included in group exhibitions at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Liverpool Biennial 2014, the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the 55th Venice Biennale Venice, Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome. From November 2015 until May 2017, his work will feature in Question the Wall Itself at the Walker Art Center. 

PALOMA BOSQUÊ

b. 1982, Brazil – lives and works in São Paulo

For a long time, the contemporary art field has remained rather skeptical about the integration of textile-based works because of the medium’s strong association with decorative arts. The young Brazilian artist, Paloma Bosquê succeeds in transforming the practice of weaving into a sculptural and spatial expression. The wool gently moves through her fingers and she sometimes uses her whole body to manipulate the soft and translucent structures. With patience and respect for nature, the craft and the organic materials she uses, , she searches for the right scale and size for each work. Her personal involvement and touch is crucial in this process.

Her practice has to be understood in the aftermath of Brazilian Neo-Concrete movements as well as post-minimalist strategies but also shows affinities with the vernacular and local traditions.

Many dualities hold her works together. She has a desire to compose clean and straight forms by using soft, organic, handmade fabrics that are not fixed on or around a frame. She prefers to leave space open. A gently displacement of air can already move the fabric, as if it could dance. This occurrence causes confusion in the viewer as the static looking sculptures seem to come alive.
Everything is chosen with great care, including the bar or frame that supports her work. Her main materials are wool, brass rods, bronze, lead and beeswax. Contrary to our expectations, the shiny gold-like color of the supporting structure is actually less valuable than the pigmented beeswax with its modest appearance. She combines organic and inorganic materials that touch each other in a subtle way. Her delicate and sensual works incorporate the space and light of their environment. In a work like Lapse #4, she manages to connect wall and floor. Gravity and balance are key elements in the presentation and make up of her compositions.

Paloma Bosquê has presented work at the Jewish Museum in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit and the Biennial of Mercosul in Porto Alegre.

N. DASH 

b. 1980, United States – lives and works in New York and New Mexico

The work of N. Dash emphasizes the primacy of touch, revealing the body’s generative capacity through corporeal contact and haptic engagement to open up forms of communication outside the parameters of language. This is principally expressed in sculptures or “primary source material”-pieces of factory-made fabric that are touched until degraded. They function as an idiosyncratic recording device where information passed from the hands is indexed onto the tabula rasa of cloth. The final vestiges are
photographed in order to arrest different iterations of the fabric and to sanitize its abject remains. The artist began making these works roughly 33 years ago—it spans a kind of human geologic time, from the preverbal to the present.  Each sculpture is interrelated, networked, and unfolds into the next. Dash began photographing these works in 2002. More recently, photos have been selected from the growing archive to make silkscreens on adobe substrates, utilizing an enlarged scale while embedding the image into a material that connects them directly to their visceral origins and to Dash’s body of work as a whole.

The two paintings in this exhibition use adobe as a ground. Adobe—which is dirt—is excavated from the desert and shipped to the studio in New York where it is rendered to make a mud plaster, at which time the earth shifts from the horizontal plane to the wall. The paintings are further constructed in multiple components, clad in canvas and deposits of pigment. They are built in three units each, standing apart, next to and over one another to create a whole.

N. Dash’s work was the subject of a solo show at the LA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2014-2015 and at White Flag Projects in St. Louis in 2013. She has participated in group shows at the Jewish Museum in New York, Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Berkeley Art Museum in San Francisco and more. This year she will have a solo show at Fondazione Giuliani in Rome and will be part of group shows at the American University Museum in Washington D.C. and Birmingham Museum of Art in Birmingham.

MICHAEL DEAN

(b.1977, Great-Britain – lives and works in London)

Michael Dean always chooses his words carefully when he speaks in order to articulate his thoughts. Through his voice and his tongue, the words come out of his body in a rhythmic way and the sound of the words resonate in the space. As an artist, he is even more interested in the visual aspect of language and typography and the process of transforming these into physical and fleshy entities, since language in itself has no actual physicality. His writings deal with linguistic aspects such as the sequence of similar written or spoken words. His own sculpting process, as well as his feelings and perceptions of the surroundings when he takes walks can similarly become subjects in his works. He touches universal themes such as life and socio-politic developments but also very intimate ones such as the family unit or the act of speaking and kissing. Words in his alphabet are tongue, bones, fist and shore amongst many others.

There is no desire to please the viewer, but rather to move them or to stimulate reflection. Although as a visitor one could sometimes hide one’s own body behind one of the sculptures, it is impossible to ignore these fleshy structures and the effect they have on one’s own language and body. Looking at them can provoke all kinds of associations: from protection to support to fence, tool or human being.

At a very young age, Michael Dean discovered the possibilities of working with concrete. At that time he mainly chose for this material because it was accessible and easy to work with and source. 
Working with it for many years, it became for him a fundamental and archetypical material. He casts, folds, bends, wraps it in plastic foil, hits it with a hammer and even embraces the material while shaping it. The interaction between his hands, his body and the concrete is direct, personal, free and fast. Through the process, an abstract shape is constructed and time transforms softness in a hard, static and solid volume. The outcomes are independent units that engage in a dialogue with the surrounding space or a relation with each other. Often the dimensions of his own body or the bodies of his family members inspire the scale of his works. By mixing pigment into the wet concrete mass or by soaking the books he creates in a colorful liquid or infusing them with physical action, he changes the grey and industrial connotation of concrete. He invites the viewer to come closer.

Michael Dean was nominated for the Turner Prize 2016 and has recently had solo shows at the Nasher Sculpture Museum in Dallas (2016), the South London Gallery in London (2016), the Fondazione Giuliani in Rome (2016), De Appel in Amsterdam (2015), Extra City Kunsthal in Antwerp (2015) and more. In 2017, he will present a solo show at Portikus in Frankfurt and take part in Skulptur Projekte Münster.

ANNA MARIA MAIOLINO

 b. 1942, Italy - lives and works in São Paulo

At the age of twelve Anna Maria Maiolino leaves Calabria for Venezuela, where she will stay until she is 18. She moves to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, has lived in New York for a while and has never stopped travelling. Her whole life, she has felt like an immigrant. Every time she arrives in a new cultural and socio-political environment, she has to rethink her modes of communication and how to deal with the new language. It is not a natural adaptation since she harbors nostalgic feelings for the places she left and the times that have past. The only thing she can hold on to is her self, her identity and the material through which she can express her thoughts and emotions. Her chosen forms of communication include drawing, sculpture, installation, printmaking, poetry, film and performance.

In the meantime, her oeuvre spans five decades and has been contextualized in relation to the New Figuration Movement and Neo-Concretism in Brazil, but also with New Brazilian Objectivity, Italian Minimalism and American Conceptual Art.

She creates everything herself and defines her work in the studio as labor. Her production has a rhythm and lifecycle that is closely linked to one of the materials she uses, namely clay. It evolves from a wet substance that dries, becomes fixed in the shape it is given, starts to crumble and eventually returns to dust. Other materials that appear are cement, plaster, metal, bronze, raku ceramic and acrylic ink. In the beginning, her work tended more towards figuration but this is soon abandoned in favor of more abstract forms, which create more freedom for both the artist and the viewer. Everything in her work is derived from the material. In conversations, she clearly points out the difference between being a specialist and a master in a medium. She is interested in repeating forms and working in series but each unit remains unique through the touch of the artist. Form, matter, scale, texture and composition are fundamental aspects that are given her full attention. She makes little use of color in order not to distract the viewer from the essential aspects of her practice.  

In the early nineties, she was invited for group shows in Belgium at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp and at the Kanaal Art Foundation in Kortrijk. In 2013 she was invited for a presentation at La Verrière Hermès in Brussels. Later her work was part of group shows at Tate Modern in London, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MoMA in New York and more. In 2012, she took part in dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel and in 2010 her work was on view at the Sao Paulo Biennial.

Solo shows were organized by the Berkeley Art Museum in San Francisco (2014), the Malmö Kunsthalle (2011), the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporaena in Santiago de Compostella (2011), the Foundation Antoni Tapiès in Barcelona (2010), the Camden Arts Center in London (2010) and the Pinacoteca do Estado de Sao Paulo (2005), amongst many others.

In 2017 a retrospective is to open at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The artist will also take part in group shows at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, MAR Museu de Arte do Rio in Rio De Janeiro and the LA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. In 2018 she will be part of a group show at the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn.

PHILIP METTEN

b. 1977, Belgium - lives and works in Antwerp

In his practice, the artist Philip Metten freely moves between the respective media and regimes of sculpture and architecture, purposefully suspending the disciplinary differences. In his work he brings together sculpture, drawing, interior and building design with kaleidoscopic intensity. The semantic regimes of art and architecture provide the frames of reference, but the results of his sculptural exploration of architecture, or the architectural exploration of sculpture for that matter, resist simple classification.

A daily drawing practice serves as the systemic foundation of Philip Metten’s work. It engenders the basic schemes for his sculptures, prints, and wall reliefs, as well as for larger architectural projects, such as his solo show at Z33 art space in Hasselt (Innercoma, 2010), the much-praised renovation of a bar in Antwerp (Bar, 2013), the scenography for a group show in Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerp (The Corner Show, 2015), as well as for the facade of the Kai Matsumyia gallery in New York (153. Stanton, 2015). 

Most recently in Netwerk Aalst (2016), the artist showed a preliminary stage of ESSEN, an interior design for a restaurant in Borgerhout that is currently being built and will open its doors later this year. ESSEN sees Metten returning to a drawing made in 2008, which he implements both sculpturally and architecturally while using the specific space of the prospective restaurant as his point of departure.

For the exhibition at Zeno X Gallery, Metten once again turned to producing wall reliefs, each of which are again derived from elaborate collages and drawings. Painted in silver, these geometrically sculpted works recall ancient emblems as well as futuristic insignia, revealing the artist’s predilection for a visual language that espouses future with prehistory. Drawing upon references from ancient sculpture, modernist and postmodernist architecture, to sci-fi film and experimental cinema, Metten presents us with sculptures that can be read as either masks or architectural models, heraldic signs or urban topography.

SOLANGE PESSOA 

b. 1961, Brazil - lives and works in Belo Horizonte

Much of the Brazilian cultural tradition that encompasses music, literature and art, largely emerged from the lands of Minas Gerais. The work by Solange Pessoa is embedded in this context. She lives in Belo Horizonte, one of the larger cities in Brazil.

Since the late eighties, Solange Pessoa developed an artistic career with a core focus on sculpture, but she also works in other media such as installation, ceramic, painting and video. Since 1993, she teaches sculpture at the Guinard School of Art at Minas Gerais State University. Her practice is informed by the Brazilian Baroque as well as other influences from international art history and developments in the contemporary art scene such as Land Art. Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson moves her strongly.

Her oeuvre is rooted in, and inspired by, the richness and heritage of ancient cultures. With a minimum of technology and without using complex representation techniques, these cultures were able to communicate and express how they envisioned the world and their lives. In a similar way, Solange Pessoa looks at her environment and translates her experiences and emotions in organic forms and compositions. She only focuses on that which is fundamental and essential.

The soapstones are hollow, carved volumes that envelop only air and emptiness. Through an intensive and physically demanding process, the artist brings her whole body into action and repeats destructive movements to create space and form. The texture of the surface is a succession of traces of these actions. Sometimes she creates a spiral on the inside, following the outline of the form as if to reveal a drawing or otherwise inviting the viewer to enter this intimate space. The curved lines in her oeuvre refer to the female body and the lifecycle of nature. 

Her sculptures could be containers or relicts of rituals. Actually, they could be many things. The earth is her main resource. It gives her stones, earth to make clay, pigment to paint, copper and tin to produce bronzes and vegetation that embraces her sculptures or fills them such as in the corner piece ‘Untitled’, from 1999. Some of the works only exist a lifetime, others long for eternity. She searches for relations between living and dead materials, between the solid and the fragile, but also explores how her work becomes part of landscapes and architecture. Burle Marx designed a beautiful garden for the Art Museum of Pampulha in Belo Horizonte where some of her sculptures are permanently installed on a hillside nearby the water.

Pessoa has been invited for several solo shows in museums in Brazil but also took part in a number of international group shows, including at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami (2016), CAPS Musée d’Art Contemporain in Bordeaux (2001) and many more.

HYUN-SOOK SONG

b. 1952, Korea - lives and works in Hamburg

The roots of Hyun-Sook Song originate in a rural mountain village in South Korea. In her early twenties, she arrives in West-Germany through a scholarship and only returns home occasionally. From 1976 to 1981 she studied at the College of Fine Art in Hamburg. A few years later in the period 1984-1985, Hyun-Sook Song returned to her homeland to focus on Korean Art history at Chonnam National University in Gwangju.

Her attitude is strongly influenced by eastern philosophy and a respect for life, nature, the body and materials. Painting, for her, is a performative action. She positions the framed canvas onto the floor and balances over the painting on a simple wooden plank that is placed over the length of the work. She is conscious about how many brushstrokes she applies to create an image. Often this information is revealed in her titles. Especially when she paints the white stroke, typical of her work, she finds herself in a state between concentration and meditation. This intensity only allows her to paint a few hours a day, yet she needs to practice every day to train her hand. She carefully prepares everything beforehand to have peace and silence in her mind and body. Her vocabulary is limited but variations seem infinite. Every brush stroke is unique and creates another image because the relation with the surface, the scale and the light is different.

The paintings by Hyun-Sook Song have a cinematographic quality; it appears as if the artist has frozen a moving image. She choses a specific moment on the basis of its beauty and sense of harmony.  Like a camera, the artist zooms in on her subject to reveal details about the structure and transparency of the material. The wooden sticks and textiles are suggestive and hover between abstraction and figuration. All the images are derived from her memory and imagination. She remembers the eco-friendly and humble lifestyle of her family. As a child, she was fascinated by how her mother spun thread from raw cotton and wove cloth on the loom. With her paintings she revisits the past and honors her background while being so far from home. A white cloth on a wooden stick reveals a trace of human passage. It can be a sign of hope, surrender or grief.

Aside from painting, Hyun-Sook Song has also been working as a documentary filmmaker. Her work has been on view at the Hamburger Kunsthalle (1982), the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul (2014), the Gwangju Museum of Art (2013), the Poznan Biennial in 2008, the Leeum Samsung Museum  of Art in Seoul (2007), the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo (2005), the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco (2003), the Berkeley Art Museum in San Francisco, the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg (1991) and many more.