Jongsuk Yoon. Yellow May

About

Marian Goodman Gallery Los Angeles is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of Korean-German artist Jongsuk Yoon in the United States.

Born in South Korea in 1965, Yoon relocated to Europe in the early 1990s to study art at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under German conceptual artist Fritz Schwegler. After her studies, she settled in Düsseldorf and focused her practice on drawings and paintings that hover in the space between figuration and abstraction. In works on paper, canvas, as well as directly on walls, Yoon creates charged and dreamlike color field landscapes that reflect her interests in both European and American Modernism and East Asian traditions.

For this exhibition, two expansive, mural-sized paintings April Mai (2023) and June (2024) are presented in the Main Gallery. Featuring poetic silhouettes of mountainscapes, they reference the border between North and South Korea, as well as the artist’s own childhood memories. Across a vast and mesmerizing pictorial space, Yoon’s unique approach to painting is found in atmospheric layers of highly gestural and variously textured brushstrokes. The colors, a rich palette of bright yellows, soft fushias, and pale blues, are also references to specific memories, such as azalea blossom-covered mountains in the Korean springtime. The disembodied forms of color present this profoundly fraught geopolitical terrain as an anti-monumental, illusory reverie.