[SEOUL] WITH THESE EYES
ROY AURINKO, KIM BOOKER, ALEXANDER DIK, FLORENCE HUTCHINGS,
SPILLER + CAMERON, TRUDE VIKEN
6 - 28 SEPTEMBER 2024
Hosted by JARILAGER Gallery Seoul, the group exhibition With These Eyes presents a curated selection of paintings by Roy Aurinko, Kim Booker, Alexander Dik, Florence Hutchings, Spiller+Cameron, and Trude Viken. With These Eyesrevisits the gallery’s mission to foster cross-pollination and meaningful exchange among artists. The exhibition highlights different practices of portrait painting today. In a world as diverse as contemporary art, where finding reassuring unities or identifying clear genres is difficult, portraiture does not seem to have lost its traditional magic. Rather, how we see ourselves and each other in an age of exponential media exposure has become one of the most prevailing questions. With These Eyes offers a refreshing approach to find answers.
With accurate representations no longer a responsibility, contemporary painters look at portraiture with new eyes. They dissolve unpredictable barriers between internal and external landscapes to bring forth singular experiences of the figure: in and out of body and mind. Portraits become privileged spaces for expressionist, imaginative, abstract, political, and existential explorations of what it means and what it looks like to be human. Notions of marginality and alienation, dreams of androgynous and gestural forms move to the centre. Just like in present technology-driven times, identities change fast, bodies are charged with bold and subversive energy, transformation and flux. Canvases incandesce and brim with poetic life.
With These Eyes integrates paintings from different inspirations and artistic subcultures. Shapeshifting from enigmatic forms of beings and things to peaks of abstract and geometric expression, the works on display bring to focus connected themes: the face as a mask, the individual as a mirror of their surroundings, and the self as a multitude.
Trude Viken’s portraits are exaggerated, hefty, laughable, tragic, and absurd – and can be seen as collective images of people today. Viken expresses many-faceted ranges of feelings, with a darkness and honesty that appeal to viewers because they recognise themselves. Her faces have developed into fantasies of how we feel behind our more-or-less successful facades.
Read more at Jarilager Gallery website down below.
