Hesse Flatow in New York City presents alumna Annette Hur’s ’19 solo exhibition Willful Unknowing. The exhibition presents new large-scale paintings that act as a triumph over trauma featuring images that are intuitive, from memories that imprint a form of body knowledge for Hur.
Hur uses insects, animals, and nature metaphorically to delve into the expressive power of the simplest apparatus of a living human body: instinct, intuition, fear, survival.
She uses hyper color-filled large-scale oil paintings to traverse between the abstract and recognizable forms. “The surface vibrates frenzied energy which demands the eye to crawl over every inch, as if going through all the details of a certain event. She commands time with these works, speeding up between fast fluid fields of color and halting to a stop with determined delineating marks as if drawing a line in the sand,” Hesse Flatow’s press release states.
The large paintings consume your full view. The viewer is then invited to focus on the patched details that devour your first perception while leaving viewers to sort this myriad of puzzled parts. The body of the works are “either camouflaged or shredded into the background evoking a sense of crisis and precarious transitional time. It is volatile with an effort to be active over things in which it could not be before. These paintings engage in an internal dialogue with the body’s desire to reveal and unfold perpetual stories of the competing imperatives that we carry as a living body: vulnerability and fear.”
Hur was born in South Korea and currently lives and works in Brooklyn. Recent exhibitions include solo/group exhibitions at Assembly Room, Wallach gallery, Gavin Brown Enterprise, Urban Zen, Times Square Space, 33 Orchard gallery in New York; Fairleigh Dickenson University in New Jersey; Heaven Gallery, Chicago Artists Coalition, Boundary in Chicago. Hur was a nominee for Rema Hort Mann Grant in 2019, a resident of BOLT Residency at Chicago Artists Coalition in 2016-2017. Hur holds a BA from Ewha Women's University(2008), BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA from Columbia University (2019).
Willful Knowing is installed for view from January 14 through February 13, 2021.
