Sohyun Bae At 375 Hudson Street Lobby 

 

March 7, 2024 - March 2025

 

 

375 Hudson Street is pleased to present 12 works by American painter SoHyun Bae on view in the lobby gallery through March 2025. 

 

Bae’s ethereal works straddle abstraction and representation, drawing upon influences from disparate sources such as Jewish mysticism, classical antiquity, and traditional Korean arts to convey a deep sense of spirituality.

 

The artist has said that she seeks silence in her work, and that her practice “is about making a gesture, a secret sign on the surface of the canvas, opening up possibilities.” One can see this idea in paintings such as So Wang Mo’s Garden, and Jasper Lake I and II, which mix focused passages that seem to describe fruits or rocks or water alongside more diffuse washes of color that suggest a vast pictorial space. 

 

Bae evokes a sense of landscape in many of the other canvases on view, like in Sikussak and I Penitenti, where a horizon line set low along their bottom edges provides the setting for ethereal shards which read as rocky outcrops emerging from the ocean. 

 

The process used by Bae is quite unusual. The artist shapes and tears pieces of rice paper which are incorporated into the surfaces of the paintings. Bae allows the paint to soak into the canvas, pouring and manipulating the viscous medium. The fragments of rice paper maintain their shape but wrinkle in response to the fluid paint and absorb it in a different way, creating texture, depth and variation of light, adding drama.

 

Bae works with highly concentrated pigments rather than standard oil or acrylic paints, generating an extraordinary intensity and luminosity of color. The results, as seen in the displayed paintings which cover over a decade from Bae’s career, are at once transcendent and contemplative.

 

The show is open to the public from 9 AM – 5 PM, Monday through Friday.

 

SoHyun Bae holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, an MFA in from Boston University as well as a Masters of Theological Studies from Harvard University. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, as well as grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. https://www.sohyunbae.com

 

375 Hudson Street, originally known as the Saatchi & Saatchi building, was completed in 1987, designed in a collaborative effort between Emery Roth & Sons, Lee Harris Pomeroy Associates, and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. The 18-story building is over 1.12 million square feet and features rotating lobby art exhibitions. In 2010, after a top-to-bottom “green” retro-fit, the building became the first existing office building in New York City to achieve LEED Gold certification for sustainability and energy efficiency. 375 Hudson Street is the downtown headquarters of media conglomerate Publicis and Turner Construction Company.

https://www.hudsonsquareproperties.com/buildings/375-hudson-street 

 

*배소현 개인전 'Wrapped Shards' @소코토갤러리, NY, 2005 <뉴욕중앙일보>

https://news.koreadaily.com/2005/02/24/life/artculture/339294.html