Carvalho Park: Kristian Touborg, Se Yoon Park, Yulia Iosilzon

About

Carvalho Park is pleased to present its inaugural participation with Frieze No. 9 Cork Street in London, simultaneously marking the gallery’s first exhibition in the United Kingdom. Featured artists include Kristian Touborg (Copenhagen), Se Yoon Park (New York and Seoul), and Yulia Iosilzon (London), represented artists by Carvalho Park. The presentation, exemplifies the artists’ cross-disciplinary practices, engaging sculpture, painting, assemblage and collage, to speak to the strange sublimities of the natural world.

Kristian Touborg

In the tension field between sculpture and painting, Danish artist Kristian Touborg realises playful but intimate works where painterly gestures, gauzy volumes, and silvery reflections create a strong poetic presence – both tactile and coolly distanced. While the work is interlaced with notions of mimesis, repetition, and simulacrum, through the use of technical strategies, Touborg’s works are anchored in the seductive authenticity that material processed by the human hand can only hold. Expanding on meditations on modern image ecology, Touborg constructs works that deflect definitive categorization. Drawn to redefine the way we understand the ordering principles of nature, Touborg evokes rhizomatic growth patterns and natural algorithms to illustrate the slippages that exist between the natural world and the digital sphere. Beam-like structures and orbs sprout up across his pictorial planes in sequence, while seemingly cast in the blue light of digital screens.

Se Yoon Park

Signature to Park’s practice, the artist lucidly marries the geometric with the autobiographical, infusing a precise Minimalist vocabulary with the tangible warmth of shared human experience. Drawing on his foundations in architecture, Park’s complex geometries and towering structures poetically expand on notions of seriality and further his meditations on eternal dualities that lead to self-actualisation. His themes are at once personal and universal – the conceptual through line is dreams. Each sculpture is catalysed by the pursuit of light, yet anchored in the fundamental dualities of light and shadow, birth and death, the immediate as a microcosm of the infinite. The formal foundations of Park’s geometries originate from trees, at once growing in light and darkness. Park’s “self-portrait” comes from the cursive line of branches, “crossroads” from branch segmentation. The forms are distilled and emphasised, with an embrace of repetition, to structure a personal, iconographic lexicon.

Yulia Iosilzon

Iosilzon’s figurative works on stretched silk are portals into vivid dreamlike worlds with roots in both ancient mythologies and contemporary social concerns. The silk fabric is transparent and yet contradictorily repellent and impenetrable, creating a thin layer of mixed oil and silicone paint on the fabric’s surface. The notion of craft is deeply embedded in her practice, which creates a constant dialogue between ceramics and painting. She often presents the two media together in interwoven installations, conceiving of the exhibition as an ecosystem. Iosilzon’s paintings hint at unfolding narratives of human-animal metamorphosis, establishing internal rhythms through the inclusion of repeated details or iterative patterns, such as waving hair or the undulating bodies of snakes. Iosilzon is interested in the power of repetitive cycles to create something new through the momentum of the painted forms, coming together in a visual language of emblems and symbols.