Description
Handkerchief on the girl. Original color aquatint and etching, 1976. Edition of 75 signed and numbered impressions on Arches paper.
Kyu-Baik Hwang is contemporary painter and printmaker, from South Korea. He served in the military during the Korean War, and after the war he began to paint. Latter, he traveled across Europe and America and got inspired by many of their cultures and artists. Displacing ordinary objects from their original environments, typical for his works is often compared to surrealist’s art from the 20th-century. Unlike surrealists, who rejected mind control and try to show the world of the unconscious, Hwang stimulates viewers’ imagination. He presents an extra-ordinary, imaginary world through ordinary spaces and objects, using different methods from printmaking to painting. We see a handkerchief with a little girl with her toys on it, as a curtain that hangs higher in the air, which gives the picture a scenic appearance. During this period of 1970s he lived in New York and visited Bear Mountain State Park a lot. Fascinated with the nature in the park with people having picnics, a grass and a handkerchief have become common motives in Hwang’s artworks.
