Hee Sook Kim | Patterns of Nature at Espronceda
Espronceda is an innovative contemporary art centre, exhibition venue and workspace that provides a multi-disciplinary environment for artists, curators and anyone who believes in the importance of art, culture and education for greater creativity and a better world.
Promoting international artists, both emerging and established, Espronceda supports them in the development of their works and their creativity, to spread their inspiration beyond their physical permanence in space.
Korean artist Hee Sook Kim, finalist of Arte Laguna Prize 14, has just started his residency at this avant-garde melting pot, and will end her experience on May 18, 2022.
The arrival of the artist at Espronceda has been postponed several times due to the pandemic, but now that she is at the center the collaboration is already bearing fruit. Her most recent project wants to convey through painting a feeling of holistic healing through the representation of medicinal plants with the insert of shining buds that give a feeling of peace.
To create these works she draws from botanical gardens, colors, potted plants and, more recently, from Gaudì’s works and his naturalistic compositions. A series of artistic influences that, the artist points out, she could not have received had she not gone to Barcelona. The artworks created during her residency will be presented in a talk on May 13th titled “Nature and Art”.
During her stay, Hee Sook Kim had the opportunity to meet the curator Savina Tarsitano, with whom she discussed to define the preparation of the works for the solo exhibition that will be held from 11 to 17 May, entitled Patterns of Experience. Here the curatorial text written by Tarsitano for the exhibition:
“Hee Sook Kim’s work leads us into the world of nature, of taking care of ourselves, healing ourselves from the catastrophic events that surround us. The work produced during her artist residency at Espronceda during her stay in Barcelona takes us to the Mediterranean world through a gaze towards the West and the East, two worlds that dialogue and meet. The feminine rises between colors and materials to also remind us of being a woman, the right of one’s own expression and freedom to exist. Hee Sook Kim decides due to the attack of the twin towers,in New York, the atrocity of those acts, the human brutality, to contribute through her art to take care of humanity. If art has a mission, it is precisely to remind us who we are, the beauty that surrounds us beyond the atrocities. Covid has led Hee Sook Kim to reflect again on the relationship between plants, nature and man, and how to take care of the soul and the body. In this phase of isolation her research intensifies the colors that rise with a such beauty as to bring us back to the natural world. The period in Barcelona, the architecture, the colors, the observation of Gaudi’s work, leads her back to that meticulous research of the particular, of the detail, of the contemplation and observation to rebalance the relationship between nature and man. The works presented in the exhibition “Patterns of Experience” have been created during her stay and journey in Barcelona, letting the place, the culture convey new elements, new colors and nuances in this series of paintings. The video installation by the composer Christopher Shultis reaches out to us in this journey that together with the works of Kim Hee Sook are completed in a single work that pushes us to enter slowly in the natural world”.
Photo credit: Omcuom Design