Saturday, March 26, 2011

Vicissitude: Duk Ju L. Kim

Vicissitude: Duk Ju L. Kim

Opening Friday April 1 from 6pm-10pm
April 1- April 30, 2011

Duk Ju L. Kim was born in Pusan, South Korea. Due to her father’s job, her family later moved to Tehran, Iran, before eventually immigrating to the United States. Duk Ju received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. After completing a residency program at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, she moved to Chicago and enrolled in the Master’s program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for one semester.

Duk Ju’s course of study at both the Bachelor’s and Master’s levels was fine art. She has received a number of honors for her work, including a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship Grant and a 2003 Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council in 2003, that state’s most prestigious recognition of artistic talent. She was selected to show at Sotheby’s International Young Art in 1999; all the paintings shown in Chicago and Tel Aviv were sold, and she continues to sell her art through Sotheby’s to international buyers.  
"For the past several years I have been working on a series of mixed media drawings and paintings featuring abstracted portraits that interact and mesh with the surrounding urban environment. Since living in Chicago, the city's raw and rigid buildings and streets have crept into my paintings. Exposed pipes, plumbing, and wires have become part of my work. Evident in my work is a sense satirical entrapment; people who cannot seem to escape the grittiness of urban living.

Gravity, violence, as well as grace, and beauty all coexist-which can be both exquisite and perverse. I portray it by exposing and intertwining the hidden with the obvious-pulling the inside out and pushing the outside in. I approach the canvas as if making a three-dimensional sculpture. Content and depth are what matter the most. I want the paint to move and shift for the viewer. Figures, mostly abstract, are constructed from lines. The colors I choose are manipulated to make space, to box space. Creating art is an intensely solitary activity for me. It is never easy to achieve a dialogue with the canvas. The fulfillment comes when that dialogue is achieved, when the canvas and I have reached a mutual respect for one another.

My earliest influences are from writers as well as painters, among them Flannery O'Connor, Kafka, Dostoevsky, and Salinger. I share their preoccupation with the human psyche and its place in society, the complex manner in which society and people intersect and interact." - Duk Ju L. Kim