My paintings attempt to engage in an internal dialogue with the body’s desire to reveal and unfold the perpetual stories of the competing imperatives that we carry as a living body: vulnerability and fear.
Multidisciplinary artist Annette Hur presents visceral, kaleidoscopic paintings that explore memory and body knowledge.
Serving as a source of catharsis, this series of works reflects the South Korea-born and Brooklyn-based artist’s inner turmoil, with various memories and experiences conflicting with each other. The densely layered compositions are balanced with a striking simplicity of subject matter.
This series reflects on the body’s ability to carry trauma that can be healed through nature.
These natural elements subtly appear through the imaginative landscapes revealing traces of life. Through the veils of form and colour the viewer begins to recognise the shapes of certain plants and animals like butterflies, racoons and lizards. Twisting and moving through the canvases these protagonists are animated, overlaid with distinctive brushstrokes that further enhance the sense of fluidity and motion.
Overview
Entirely imaginative, these rhythmic and mesmerising paintings exist between abstraction and figuration.
They incorporate natural and recognisable motifs, which are juxtaposed with less legible elements. Employing this idea of hiding and revealing, the artist explores and questions traditional and cultural binaries that are inherited in our identities. These works exemplify how our bodies carry these binaries as distant memories that spill out into peculiar imagery.
Watch
Annette Hur
Our Collective Bodies
2021
208 cm x 198 cm
Annette Hur
Snow Angel
2022
50 cm x 50 cm
Annette Hur
Counterbalance
2022
61 cm x 56 cm
Annette Hur
Sitting on the night
2022
61 cm x 56 cm
Annette Hur
Tête-à-tête
2022
203 cm x 172 cm
When l delve into bodily sensations and experiences as a female, Asian and first-generation artist, it’s inevitable to discuss discrimination, projections, and other identity-related traumas. But while my work speaks directly from my personal history, I also hope it doesn’t generalise an idea of what it’s like to be an Asian woman but shows a broader sense of our body’s ability to generate images in general; images of inexplicable memories that reside in our body.
About the Artist
Annette Hur (b. 1984, South Korea) lives and works in Brooklyn. She holds a BA from Ewha Women’s University (2008), BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2015), and MFA from Columbia University (2019).
Recent exhibitions include Hesse Flatow, Shin Gallery, Ross + Kramer, Regular Normal, Assembly Room, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, Urban Zen, and Times Square Space in New York; Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey; West Chester University, Pennsylvania; Heaven Gallery, Chicago Artists Coalition, and Boundary in Chicago. Hur was a nominee for Rema Hort Mann Grant (2019), and a resident of Vermont Studio Center (2021) and BOLT Residency at Chicago Artists Coalition (2016–2017).
Chosen Charity
Chosen Charity
Community Inclusion & Development Alliance, New York
The Community Inclusion & Development Alliance (CIDA )is a non-profit organisation that serves individuals with disabilities and their families. Their primary missions are to increase inclusion opportunities and to strengthen the capacities of individuals with disabilities. To achieve these goals, CIDA provides family support and inclusive community programs by cultivating workforce development and non-profit based cooperative projects.