LOVEED FINE ARTS
575 Madison Avenue, Suite 1006, New York, New York 10022-2511 - Tel: 212-605-0591 Fax: 212-605-0592
May 18, 2012
PRESS RELEASE
Loveed Fine Arts is pleased to present in collaboration with hpgrp Gallery New York
VERONICA JUYOUN BYUN
Common Ground – Uncommon Visions
Exhibition dates: June 7 - July 14, 2012
Opening reception: Thursday, June 7, 6-8 pm at hpgrp Gallery NY, 529 West 20th Street
Gallery Hours: Tues-Sat 11 am-6 pm
The first solo exhibition in New York of Korean-born sculptor Veronica Juyoun Byun will be on view at hpgrp Gallery, NY at 529 West 20th Street from June 7 through July 14, 2012. Common Ground – Uncommon Visions will feature seven large wall reliefs as well as intimate-sized figures and abstract constructions. Veronica Byun was born in Seoul, Korea, but has spent the better part of her adult life studying in the United States and this East/West divide has fueled a diverse visual culture and provided fodder for her visions as a young sculptor.
Borrowing visual themes from traditional ornamental craft geometries and color, Byun playfully expands and layers them into bursting and bubbling abstractions that dazzle the eye. It is clear from this exhibition that Byun embraces color and unabashedly shiny surfaces, which is somewhat rare in contemporary ceramics. Primary colors are deeply rooted in Korean and Buddhist traditions as sources of protection and enduring paradise on earth, and are at play here in Byun’s work. She seemingly stirs up her sources, and like most post-modern American artists, creates her own visual vocabulary.
Separate but playfully equal are Byun’s choices for titles. “Misty Dawn”, “Serenity after Sunset”, and “Shimmering Sea at Sunset” suggest naturalistic themes while “Lotus Saint Prayer”, “Passion Series”, and “Exotica” seemingly bow respectfully to the spirituality and the meditative state practiced by Zen masters. “My Shoes” contains a certain pop art quality in its serial imagery of common objects. “Passion Series #1” and “Exotica” are composed of abstract “nests” of forms, charged with an array of colors, as if their components were dashed against the wall or floor and are suddenly blossoming in the artists’ own “garden of delight”.
Byun’s “ever modular large scale wall works can ambitiously stretch out in unlimited formations or can contract to accommodate an appropriate wall space,” says Ronald Kuchta, former director of the Everson Museum and a current ceramic curator. This format bringing together traditional and non-traditional schemes and symbols confers a certain metaphorical aspect to Byun’s work as if the artist is on a journey to investigate the human condition.
Byun currently lives and works in New Jersey. She received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI and her BFA from the New York State of Ceramics at Alfred University in Alfred, NY. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally in galleries and public institutions in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Providence, Seoul, Varazdin, Croatia, Austria, and in Dae-Jeon City, Korea. She was recently selected in the Special Exhibition Artists Entries at the 2012 Korean Art Show in New York and has been invited to exhibit at the upcoming Special Exhibition at KIAF2012 in Korea. Byun’s alluringly erotic installation, “Memoirs of a Lady” will be featured in the Visual Art Fellowship Awards Exhibition at The Noyes Museum of Art, Oceanville, NJ from June 8 through September 9, 2012. Her work can also be found in numerous private and corporate collections including the recently large scale commissioned murals in the collection of the Royal Caribbean Cruise Line.
For further information, please contact Daniel Hamparsumyan at loveedfinearts@earthlink.net, visit our website at www.loveedfinearts.com or call 917-892-3248.