GAHEE PARK: FUN AND GAMES
Perrotin presents Fun and Games, an exhibition of new paintings by GaHee Park. The exhibition consists of nine artworks that showcase her hyperstylized romantic scenes, where art history's favorite still life subjects appear to have soured.
February 24 – April 6, 2024
In GaHee Park’s fantastical, sensual, occasionally sinister paintings, time and place are indeterminate. The world she conjures could be a glimpse of a deep past, a reflection of the present or a portal into the unconscious. Her monumental figures and cool palette – peachy flesh, lemon yellows, limpid sea-blues and shimmering greys – suggest Mediterranean islands and Classical civilizations filtered through what could be described as a Surrealist take on Pop.
Humans happily cohabit with animals, including a giant cat, a muscular ant, a spider the size of a fist. Now and then, the woman’s solitude is interrupted by a nude man – toned, young, handsome, moustachioed – whose limbs commingle with hers to such a degree that, at times, they become one.
In Fun and Games (2023) a single, sleeping, female – a pert breast rising like a small mountain on the horizon – has two heads, one of which rests on a large, ochre-red fish. At the centre of the image, two hands, with long identical fingers, clutch each other; another red fingernail is visible to the left. Like a sentry guarding the woman, a large, mottled, cat-like creature in the foreground calmly observes two spiders, one intact, the other with its legs torn off and scattered around its body.
Brought up in a strict Catholic family, Park has long employed painting as a form of exorcism: of guilt, of female desire, of transgression. The artist grew up hiding her inner life; each day involved decisions about what to reveal or conceal. Secretiveness became a necessary selfprotection and drawing a way of expressing her sense of familial alienation. Perhaps this is why the women Park paints are never victims: their bodies are powerful, their expressions inscrutable – their thoughts are their own.
She describes her approach as one that combines a search for beauty with a need to probe ‘the things we don’t talk about’. As such, she’s fascinated by the potential of still life – one of the most coded of genres – to express something more complex than the sum of its parts.
Kinsella doesn’t make self-portraits, except every picture he makes is a kind of self-portrait, his presence wrapped up in his pictures, implicated in it, “an intangible familiarity,” he calls it, a feeling that hangs between the shapes. His shapes, held together by a thin gravity, have a precarity, the feeling that things could easily come undone. This makes them, in the end, about life — stubbornness in the face of impermanence.