OH, the interspaces of Berlin Art Week 2016

About

The work of Junggeun Oh is centered around the unusual balance between two surfaces.
Junggeun Oh has been working for several years now on the Interspaces, taking the silhouette of buildings against the sky from his own subjective viewpoint in different cities and so creating a very personal map of the town. In countless variations he goes in pursuit of a shape, which he might have found in the urban reality, but which he uses to create the most abstract form dividing surfaces from each other. He leaves the viewer marvelling at the strange balance between the two, where none overweighs the other and where there is no foreground and background but just plain surface.
Oh uses strong colours with a deep glow and without relation to the motive. He especially favours the colour red, which is shown in endless variations, from very bright to a very dark brownish hue. Black is also a favorite of his, from charcoal to lacquer. The contrast between the areas in his pictures might be also between very smooth areas and very rough areas formed by a lot of small brushstrokes. The continuous repetition of gestures and the erasing of the individual handwriting gives his work a meditative trait. It goes way beyond the reflection on the individual defining himself in the borders and bounds of architecture and society and has a stern mathematical beauty about it. In his late works, surfaces are cut out and canvas contrasts with flimsy fragile cardboard, with a small interstice between the two. And he leaves the square frame, choosing unusual contours also for the outer border of his pictures.
His paintings have a special hermetic elegance about them, they become flat sculptures.