Kang Chan Mo, Lee Kwan Woo, Suki Maguire & Kim Jae Il

April 2016

Lilac Gallery New York is pleased to present “Art In Korea” an exhibition of works by Kang Chan Mo, Lee Kwan Woo, Suki Maguire & Kim Jae Il from April 2016.

Kang Chan-Mo On captures in a magnificent way the heights of the Himalayan range, marked by series of snowy crests, where earth and the horizon seem to marry, a strange light craves the peaks and the rolling valleys and projects its shady folds. Using the particularities of Korean paper, hemmed of light fluffs, conceiving his scores with his own pigments like a veritable geometrician of the space, accustomed to the rigor of the contrasts and the sequences.

Kwan Woo Lee creates paintings two dimensional surfaces composed of stamps. Each stamp carries a word or a pictograph or just a design of the artist's concept. The stamps are placed, in an uneven, undulating layer, across a flat surface. Some just out, some receded. All yet, it is difficult to describe them as sculpture. They are created as fields and waves when seen at a distance. As a forest is composed of trees, and an ocean of infinite drops of water, so Lee's constructions achieve completion by the accumulation of many. 

Suki Maguire presents a series of works that tantalizes the imagination with bold strokes of dark and light, hinting at shapes both human and ethereal and pulling us through the two-dimensional surface of the canvas into the mysterious depths of a multidimensional world. Her works resonate with strong, masculine strokes, vibrant colors, and passionate themes, having a great potential for discovery in Maguire's world of symbols, making this creations of a very fecund imagination that was able to be rendered on canvas.

The Vestige series by Kim Jae Il are traces and marks, as visible evidence of something that is no longer present or in existence, something that is disappearing. These pieces became the artists expression, creating the last vestiges as a part or organ of an organism that has become reduced or functionless in the course of evolution. These works as a surviving evidence or remainder of some existing living condition, as a very slight trace or amount of something. As if it was a degenerate or imperfectly developed organ or structure that has little or no utility, but that in an earlier stage of the individual, or in preceding evolutionary forms, the organism performed an artistic useful function.