From Sep 1 to Oct 30, 2022, Kukje Gallery is pleased to show work by Lee Seung Jio, who died in 1990. The artist's first show the unique visual language of a Korean painter who spent his career building a geometric abstraction vocabulary. He began his "Nucleus" series in 1967. Which was he first "pipe" shape, which would become a common theme in his later paintings, showed up in the 10th painting of the series and kept showing up in his "Nuclear" series, which he worked on until he died at the age of 49 in 1990.
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| ▲An installation view, Kukje Gallery in Seoul, Courtesy of Kukje Gallery |
In 1968, Lee Seung Jio painted the tenth painting in the Nucleus series, which was his first "pipe" paint and kept showing up in his "Nuclear" series until he died at in 1990. He used masking tape to make the edges of the canvas and then used a flat brush and oil paint to paint what would become his most famous archetypal subject. By putting light paint in the middle of the brush and dark paint on both ends, he was able to paint each color band with just one stroke. By using this technique repeatedly, he erased the difference between the different colors in the brushstrokes. This created a natural gradient that also gave the painting an uncanny sense of depth. After putting down the colors for the bands, the artist would sand the surface of the painting and burnish the medium to make it look even more like metal. By putting simple shapes and color changes in a strict order, Lee's forms soon became the most important part of his vocabulary.
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