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Indepth Arts News:
"Canned Oxygen - Shin-Hye Park, Jean Claude Boutrouille Part of Group Show"
2011-03-05 until 2011-03-25 Icosahedron Gallery
New York, NY, USA United States of America
Icosahedron Gallery is pleased to present "Canned Oxygen," a group show focused ondiverse approaches to contemporary landscape. "Canned Oxygen's" works range from traditional landscape to urban dystopia, from Abstract Expressionist inspired paintings to visual metaphysical studies. Theinternational roster of featured artists includes Shin-Hye Park and Jean Claude Boutrouill, who are Premiere Portfolio Members at absolutearts.com, as well as, Monika Degan, Stephan Degan, Flavio Carvalho, Barbara Burger, David Abse, , Susan L�th Hedegaard, Fabio Adani, Giovanni Greppi, Michinori Maru, M�lanie Lefebvre, and Vlado Tudja.

IMAGE
Artist: Shin-Hye Park
Title: In Itself
Year: 2009
Medium: Oil Painting
Width: 162 cm
Height: 112 cm
Price: US$ 10,000
Purchase this work
View more of Shin-Hye Park's works at absolutearts.com absolutearts.com/shinhyepark
See Jean Claude Boutrouill's works at absolutearts.com absolutearts.com/jboutrouil
Shin-Hye Park, Monika Degan, and Stephan Degan employ traditional techniques in theirlandscape paintings. Shin-Hye Park of Korea considers her minimal, tranquil seascapes more spiritual than photorealist. Park's carefully-cropped compositions communicate notions of inner peace, balance, and Zen through the fluidity of waves. Married couple Monika and Stephan Degan live and work in Houston, Texas. Before moving to Houston in 1984, Monika was raised in Switzerland. She paints detailed landscapes and seascapes in skilled watercolors. Stephan Degan studied oil painting at The Gary Hernandez School of Fine Art in Houston. Stephan's work celebrates the beauty of nature in his representational landscapes. Artists Flavio Carvalho and Barbara Burger's subjects are the city in their modern concrete landscapes. Award-winning Brazilian designer Flavio Carvalho's digital C-prints of New York's rooftop water towers portray the signature melancholy of the city. Shot while on a visit to New York, Carvalho captures the poetryof the empty expanse of sky above the buzzing city. American Barbara Burger illuminates the magic of New York in her paintings. Burger renders familiar places such as the Brooklyn Bridge with heartfelt emotion. David Abse, Jean Claude Boutrouille and Susan L�th Hedegaard's works reinterpret the physical world in colorful abstract landscapes. United Kingdom's David Abse has exhibited in the UK andinternationally since studying art and design at The University of Wolverhampton in the 1980's. Now living in the south of France, Absecites a combination of his external and internal environments asinspiration for his raw, gestural paintings. Jean Claude Boutrouille isan intellectual and lover of literature, art, music, cooking andculture. A self-taught painter from France, Boutrouille works in the modernist traditions of Abstract Expressionism, adding a touch of hisbeloved classics with intentionally cracked and aged surfaces. Susan L�th Hedegaard of Denmark embraces chaos and chance in her abstract,mixed media pieces. Working on elongated plexiglass panels, Hedegaard's work is lively and filled with drama. Exploring landscape from a metaphysical perspective is Fabio Adani, Giovanni Greppi, Michinor iMaru, and M�lanie Lefebvre. Italian Fabio Adani's cold, minimal, predominately blue landscapes redefine the boundaries of thought and reality. Adani's sparse spaces highlight the possibility that idea isreality itself. Italian-born Giovanni Greppi's breadth of international experiences, including the destruction a body of his work by guerrilla fighters in Colombia, have informed his sensitive abstract paintings. Now working in Tuscany, Greppi continually produces abstract artworkrooted in themes of idealism and compassion. Michinori Maru of Japan, breaks down physical spaces in his cubist-influenced work using hisself-coined term, "The Zune," referring to the gap between theactuality and the memory of experience. M�lanie Lefebvre, of Canada, explores a range of emotions through focus and manipulation of the horizon line. She states, "a line creates space but also divides ininto two symbiotic parts". Showing formal influence of Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko, Lefebvre seeks to create a "sensitive rather than descriptive" space.

Canned Oxygen - Icosahedron Gallery, New York

Shin-Hye Park

Korean painter Shin Hye Park recent work can only be described as eloquent. A showcase for her ongoing series of carefully cropped vistas of ocean tides caressing sandy shores, the work evidences a Zen-like sensibility in theme, style, and curatorial approach. The paintings themselves, almost obsessive in their unyielding preoccupation with the sea, waves, and deserted beaches, together produced a powerful sense of the passage of time through a  series of slow motion freeze frames. Walking past them is like taking a stroll by the sea. Park believes that nature is the point of departure in trying to understand the meaning of life, so it comes as no surprise that she would be drawn to two of mother nature’s basic elements: land and sea.

 Her minimal palette—sandy whites, stormy grays, salty aquamarines – also speaks to her thematic preoccupation. Conceptually, Park’s minimalist approach suggests a penchant for the symbolic and the abstract, and it would be mistake to label her a photorealist or landscape painter.
Through her simple yet decidedly sophisticated canvases, she succeeds in apprehending a sense of spirituality, a communion with God or another higher being that one may experience in meditation.
Much like the Tibetan monks who focus all of their attention on one mandala for extended periods of time, Park draws a singular focus upon the image of the sea, in all of its detailed minutiae. Through seemingly unchanging, the elements of water, sand, and sky are actually in a constant state of flux. With each lapping of a wave, each washing of the shore, and each change of tide, the colors and shapes of the natural environment are altered, and Park seeks to capture its ephemeral moods.

Ultimately, it is a sense of equilibrium that Park seeks to express, and she equates this sense of inner peace and quiet balance to the attainment of a “divine state”. The fact that these realist paintings transform themselves before our eyes into abstractions in which we perceive not only the images themselves, with all their subtle variations of color and form, but also the feelings of solitude and pensive contemplation they engender, speaks to Park’s ability to capture the spiritual on canvas.

Park Shin hye depicts the sea succinctly with minimum intervention. The sea she paints is neither dramatic nor realistic, its appearance is of no significance. Stopping our gaze at the sea’s appearance, Park paints waves and beaches with incomplete brush touches using color to a minimum. Park explores the essence of nature through the sea. The creation, change, and extinction of waves represent for Park the principles of nature. Park’s work reminds us that man is part of nature, and must obey its order. As the sea is in the Lowest position, all water including streams and rivers flow down to the sea, embracing alt. The reason the sea surpasses all rivers is the sea towers itself, Laozi said. The sea shows a humble attitude to humans who remain arrogant and overestimate our selves, to trigger our contemplation of and communion with nature.


                                                                    - ico Gallery 글에서

Canned Oxygen in Icosahedron Gallery, New York

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