HA CHONG-HYUN
Almine Rech Gstaad is pleased to present Ha Chong-Hyun’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. A major figure of Korean abstract painting, he is a founding member of the avant-garde movement Dansaekhwa.
February 12 – March 15, 2024
He has played an essential role in the international reconsideration of the history of abstraction and modernity. Within this new generation of artists, his formal explorations, primarily guided by material and volume, the surface of the canvas, and the frame, profoundly transformed the nature of Korean art, while also converging with movements or groups of Western artists with similar concerns, at least in the radicalness that characterized the time, such as Supports/Surfaces, Arte Povera or Post-Minimalism.
Born during the Japanese occupation, Ha Chong-Hyun experienced the major political and economic transformations in Korea after the Second World War: a fratricidal war with its neighbor to the north and the authoritarian regimes of the '60s and '70s, which were accompanied by significant economic growth and rapid industrialization, leading in particular to the whirlwind development of modern architecture. Ha countered the official figurative art of the regime and focused on colorful geometric abstraction whose lines echoed the urban grid of the rapidly changing city of Seoul (Urban Planning Series).
In this way, the wide blue vertical lines in Conjunction 23-34, which are serene and harmonious and made with a very thick application of paint, do not have exactly the same chromatic value, giving almost the illusion of a polychromatic painting. Composed at irregular intervals, they appear to have begun their trajectory outside of the frame from the bottom of the painting, and to have ended, with even more significant impasto, at the upper part of the canvas.
Ha Chong-Hyun’s abstractions very often have this sculptural, three-dimensional quality, a sign of his attachment to spatiality and volume. Among the many anti-academic experimentations that have shaped his artistic language, Ha Chong-Hyun has also been inspired by a process used in Korean ceramics, of which he is particularly fond. Using a piece of burning cotton, he embeds soot on the surface of the canvas to create an additional layer of color variations in a delicate interplay of shadows.
In conclusion, the artistic conjunctions of Ha Chong-Hyun aspire to harmony by arranging encounters between materials (oil paint and hemp canvas), creative processes with a performative aspect, and the artist’s inner state. Each of his paintings owes its existence to these combinations.
A master of restraint, including in the colors he uses (white, gray, blue, and red), Ha Chong-Hyun is able to establish unexplored dialogues between the painted and unpainted surface, or to reinvent the brushstroke infinitely. Expressing subtle formal purity, his painting is intimately linked to a spirituality that is profoundly meditative, perfectly embodying philosophical quietude and serenity in a confrontation with time.