© YUN SEONG-RYEOL/COURTESY PKM GALLERY, SEOUL AND DAVID ZWIRNER, NEW YORK
David Zwirner announced that the gallery now represents the work of Yun Hyong-keun in New York. Yun, who lived from 1928 to 2007, is best known for abstractions that bring together Korean scholarly painting and various strands of 20th-century abstract art.
The gallery noted, in a news release, that Yun’s work is associated with the Dansaekhwa (monochromatic painting) movement, in which Korean artists developed “their own sets of rules and structures in relation to abstraction.” Yun’s paintings use a restricted palette of ultramarine and umber, wet-on-wet layers of paint applied onto raw canvas or linen. The dark, seeping vertical bands create captivating tensions between presence and void.
In 1974, Yun encountered the work of Mark Rothko and other American postwar artists, pushing him to “further explore ways to divide pictorial space,” the gallery said. His work impressed many artists, including Donald Judd, who gave him shows at his Spring Street loft in New York and his spaces in Marfa, Texas, during the 1990s. These were Yun’s first solo presentations in the United States.
A survey of the artist’s paintings from the 1970s and ’80s will take place at Zwirner’s 537 West 20th Street location in January 2017. It will be the largest solo exhibition of Yun’s work in North America to date and will include a selection of large-scale paintings, many never shown in public before.