The Forest

About

As her third solo exhibition in New York, abstract painter Duri Park will present the forest series, which has been her subject from the beginning of her artistic career. Forest is part of the Earth, the universe and foundation of life. As a part of nature that has life, it shares similar traits to humans – to live in harmony with others. Her thoughts on the forest motivate many imaginative and pictorial expressions. Thus her works reflect the image of forest and Earth which include the beginning and end of life through layers of color. 

Recognized for her early paintings of forest, the works in this exhibition continue her recent experimentations with a profound structure. Her early paintings depict the idea of nature’s providence by portraying earth forms. More recently, she has become focused on the “invisible world” of the forest. The things that are merely visible to us are not all there is. As an artist, she is attracted to those things which disappear within a moment, and some of the images in her paintings are responses to the gestures of loneliness or despair of the small and insignificant.

By building layers of color, she shows nature’s intention through its peculiar perceptional depth. She wishes that her work is to have the viewer achieve a state of attainment, through a process of meditating on the mysteries of living things. 

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Duri Park (b. 1958 in South Korea) lives and works in New York. She studied at the Art Students League of New York in 2015. She received her MFA from Kyungnam University in 2000 and BFA from Sejong University in 1981. For the past two decades, she had more than 29 solo exhibitions of painting, including 9 international exhibitions in Paris, Taiwan, Osaka, Tokyo, Rome, San Francisco, and New York. Also, she participated more than 300 group exhibitions worldside, including in Russia, Sweden, Austria, China, Japan, and Thailand. Important mural commissions include Changwon MBC, Lotte Department Store, and the Muhak Company in South Korea.