Park seo-bo He is considered one of the leading figures in contemporary Korean art, and is also credited as the father of the movement. dansaekhwa, a current that avoided any reference to western realism in its works, creating mainly paintings monochromatic and minimalist.
Source: Andrew Russell, The New York Times.
Born in 1931 in Yecheon, Gyeongbuk, Park was part of a generation that was deeply affected by the Korean war, which took place from 1950 to 1953 and divided the country into North and South.
In 1961, thanks to his talent, he obtained a scholarship from the UNESCO and ended up spending a year in Paris. There he found himself fascinated by the power of art and especially the freedom offered by a blank canvas, so he began to experiment with Western abstraction, particularly the style of Informal Art.
Park began exploring a methodology more introspective that had its origins in Taoist and Buddhist philosophy and also in the Korean tradition of calligraphy.
In early works, Park used repeated pencil lines etched into a still wet monochromatic painted surface, and later works expand on this language by introducing hanji, a traditional Korean paper made by hand with mulberry bark, which adheres to the surface. of the canvas.
This development, along with the introduction of color, allowed for an expansive transformation of his practice as he continued the search for emptiness through reduction.
Thanks to this new process that he was adopting in his work, Park seo-bo began to open doors and expand his curiosity, which fueled his conversion into a fundamental figure in the contemporary art Korean with his foray into the dansaekhwa, a synthesis between the traditional Korean spirit and Western abstraction, which emerged in the early 1970s in the South Korea postwar.
By getting fully into this trend, he began to gain international recognition despite the fact that the Korean monochrome movement has never been defined with a manifest.
His anguish immediately after the Korean war, as well as the influence of informal art in his early works, can be seen in his series primordialis, made in the early 1960s, characterized by aggressive brush strokes, dark tones and amorphous shapes.
However, by the mid-1960s, the artist had rejected the Western approach and began to devote his time to learning Eastern philosophy.
Along with artists like Chung Chang Sup y lee ufan, who are commonly known for the use of a neutral palette (white, beige and black), their material, emphasis on pictorial components and fabrics, as well as their gestural and systematic process began to be seen in the rest of the world, so who are considered the founding members of the monochrome movement.
As early as 1957, he helped establish the Hyun-Dae Artists Association around the principles of the artistic report, whose gestural techniques and abstract, such as those of action painting and the field of color in the United States, would allow young Korean artists to express themselves.
In the paintings of Park seo-bo process and discipline prevail, a departure from the artist's early aesthetic, who was inspired by a French movement that emerged in parallel with the expressionism American abstract during the WWII.
Today, Park's work continues to be exhibited internationally at the Langen Foundation, Neuss, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Fine Arts de Boston,XNUMXst Venice Biennale, Samsung Art Museum, Seoul, art Museum de Portland, Oregon, Museum of Art of Singapore, Kunsthalle Wien de Vienna, And in the Brooklyn museum de NY, among many other places.
His work is included in the collections of the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden and Museum, Washington; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; M+, Hong Kong; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; The National Museum of Contemporary Art de Seoul; and the K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, among others.
