Fredric Snitzer-Gallery, ” “The Recovery of Openness, Intimacy and Trust, and Erika Malzoni “Infected”, 2019″
Hiejin Yoo
The Recovery of Openness, Intimacy, and Trust
Fredric Snitzer Gallery is pleased to present, The Recovery of Openness, Intimacy, and Trust, Hiejin Yoo’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Included in this exhibition is a selection of paintings chronicling Hiejin’s experiences, focusing on the day-to-day in contemporary life.
Yoo’s paintings are an intimate journal that mediates on self-discovery. They grow from journal entries and the world around her. Each painting contains information (color, gesture, objects) that reminds her of these personal experiences. The canvas narrates an anecdote Yoo wants to convey, often zooming in and cropping the parts that she does not deem necessary. These fragmented memories often encompass her remarkably intimate perception of these moments and give the viewer a window in which to see into them. Her use of color within the work captures the feelings of her experiences she paints from. This ambiance of a specific space in time is key. Using flashes and oils, She creates simple and subtle changes using different physical textures resulting in calm atmospheres; this surface, an abstraction of the memory in a certain frame of mind.
Yoo expresses contemporary life through the figure and interactions among surroundings; ordinary objects used daily, and the familiar human form. Choices in different scales and multiple perspectives push the figure outside of the pictorial frame, never fully revealing the figurative subjects within.
Hiejin Yoo is a German born, Korean artist currently living and working in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from University of California, Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States, Greece, and London. Recent notable exhibitions include Early 21st Century Art at Almine Rech, London; SEED at Paul Kasmin, New York; and Quotidian, Half Gallery, New York.
Fredric Snitzer Gallery is currently showing its first solo exhibition from the German-born Korean artist, Hiejin Yoo, who is now living and working in LA. Yoo’s exhibition entitled The Recovery of Openness, Intimacy, and Trust, has a focus on personal experiences, specifically the day-to-day moments and routines of contemporary life.
Using a potent color palette and distinctive cartoon-like white outlines, Yoo is creating recognizable snapshots of everyday life. By capturing mundane home scenes, romantic moments with her partner or random occurrences from urban life, she is creating a personal visual journal that many can identify with. Mixing classic painterly techniques with the playfulness of comic-like cropping and outlining, all fragmented memories are stripped of their factuality and specifics. With specific color choices resonating with the particular feeling of her experiences, she manages to accent the overall ambiance of the moment without fully revealing the figurative subjects within.
Falling in love, it’s said, slows time and clouds one’s better judgment. Details get hazy, except for the right ones—those become rose-colored. In Hiejin Yoo’s “The Recovery of Openness, Intimacy and Trust,” sunsets, lovers, and smooth-haired pets alike are imbued with the myopia of real devotion. The oil paintings look cropped, with some details removed to venerate other details. In Balmy As Spring Air, 2019, two long-armed torsos rub against each other, sharing a chair. In Any Ideas?, 2019, an orange-hued figure holds their own hand—perhaps for comfort. Yoo’s subjects are often postcard clichés—a fairy-tale house, a couple’s walk at sunset, a pet curled up on a chair—but her colors are expansive, her textures tender and meticulous. When she zooms in close and off-kilter, something dreamlike, not cloying, emerges: In You Came to My Dream Last Night, 2019, swaths of wheat overlay a mass of a hill, the silhouette of a head, and what might be a fence.
Erika Malzoni
Infected
Fredric Snitzer Gallery is pleased to present Infected, Erika Malzoni’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Included in this exhibition is a large sculptural installation alongside a series of ceramics chronicling a recent 40 day period the artist spent in Miami. Erika Malzoni’s multidisciplinary approach to her artistic practice often results in object based works that include ready-made assemblages, sculptures, and installations. Her works stem from an interest in giving prominence to ordinary, discarded materials, questioning how an object acquires its value, conventions, and transience. With an attentive and generous gaze, Malzoni collects and resignifies these leftovers of daily life transpiring something of little worth into aesthetic value.
The ceramics inaugurate a more experimental and expressive branch of her work, and appear in shapes that resemble trees and tongues, seeking to preserve the primary gesture of chiseling clay: they are smashed, kneaded, pressed, twisted, and stretched. Such abundant marks left by the artist on the pieces manifest the restlessness in determining their contours, which come up from the contact with the material rather than ensuing from a previous plan. Erika’s ceramics are unruly and do not submit to the technical process: incidents are incorporated and even desired, such as fractures that can occur during the firing process. In addition, her ceramic pieces are often painted with unusual materials other than glazes (i.e. spray paint). Resembling other areas of her research, Erika’s ceramics indicate her generosity with the material – a reflection on what is easily disposable when not regarded as ideal.
Erika Malzoni was born in Itapetininga, Brazil in 1966. She currently lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. Malzoni’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout Brazil and Portugal. In 2018, Erika was the recipient of the Acquisition prize at the XX Bienal de Cerveira in Portugal.