Yoo Youngkuk once said that he used the mountain as his principal motif because it contained everything that was needed in painting: color, straight and curved lines, and light. Like Cézanne, he treated nature as geometric forms, substituting rectangles, circles, and triangles for the French master’s cylinder, sphere, and cone. For Yoo, the triangle represented the mountain; the circle referred to the sun or the moon–the source of light; and the lines were their illuminating rays, pressing the natural world into two-dimensional geometric shapes and into pure colors and light. He also said that the subject of his oeuvre is nature, which he explores through non-figurative forms, through lines, planes, and colors, that is, through abstraction, in his search for clarity and the immutable.
And who was Yoo Youngkuk? He was a pioneering abstract artist considered to be one of South Korea’s foremost modernist painters who will be introduced to New York this month in a comprehensive survey of his work at Pace Gallery (November 10th through December 23rd), his first solo exhibition outside his native country. Revered
