LOS ANGELES, CA.- Andrew Shire Gallery announced the solo exhibit of Eun Nim Ro. Known as one of Korea’s leading contemporary artists, Ro’s work is highly reflective of her complex background, cultivating qualities that embody the German Neue Wilde rediscovery of Fauvism and Expressionism as well as the folk traditions of her native Korean heritage. Born in Chonju, Korea, immediately after the Second World War, Ro moved to West Germany as a young artist, to study and ultimately to live and work in Hamburg. Trained both in nursing as well as the arts, Ro reflects a deep appreciation of “Art Brut” - the art of children and the institutionalized.
In her exhibit at the Andrew Shire Gallery, Ro leans toward a more abstract pictoriality. In his essay for the exhibition catalogue Peter Frank states “Ro’s Work brims with a primal, irresistible almost frightening joy and directness. But its formal qualities betray her highly discerning eye and deliberate hand.”
Ro’s work reflects images derived from her imagination rather than reality. Such images are described by Frank as “fanciful spaces filled with indescribable or highly stylized, yet vital beings. Some of these creatures are described with forceful simplicity, like traditional calligraphic markings, absent of color and given a contemporary edge. Others teem and engulf the picture plane with their proliferation, not to mention their luscious palette.” Such qualities of her work reflect the same childlike characteristics evident in the work of Paul Klee, Picasso and post-surrealist gestural painting, classifying her not as neo-expressionist but as neo-CoBrA.
The cultivation of eastern qualities in Ro’s art is highly respected in her native Korea. Her work often reveals the deep rooted eastern calligraphic tradition of her homeland, and in this tradition, Ro often uses poetry to clarify the spirit and impulse driving her art.
In is a spirit of play, an impulse to mischief that manifest most clearly and emphatically in Ro’s effervescent apparitions and evocative objects that her art doesn’t simply ask us, but prompts us, to lighten our grasp on life – and thereby to relish it that much more.
