By K.B. (Kyu-Baik ) Hwang
Located in New Orleans, LA
Walt Whitman's poem states: "grass is the handkerchief of the Lord" and Korean artist, K.B. Hwang, depicts that thought in this color mezzotint released in an edition of 75. It is signed, titled and annotated 40/75 in pencil.
Born in Pusan in 1932, Kyu-Baik Hwang was by 1968 a well-established painter in Korea when he decided to seek new challenges in Europe. In Paris, he studied art history at the Ecole du Louvre and printmaking at the celebrated Atelier 17. Working with founder Stanley Hayter, among the most innovative and influential printmakers of the 20th century, Hwang mastered various intaglio techniques. By the time he moved to New York City in 1970, where he resided for thirty years, Hwang was primarily working in color mezzotint, a print medium to which he now devotes himself exclusively.
With soft lighting and colors at once vivid and subdued, Hwang depicts familiar objects in surreal settings: chairs on the lawn cast shadows on what appear to be grey skies behind; reflections of a crescent moon peek from soup bowls on the grass; a wedge of watermelon floats among rolling hills of green. His "superb prints" present "a serene world of unexpected classical calm" while offering the viewer "new meanings, new recognitions, of the realities found in (them)" (Gordon Gilkey...
Category
1970s Modern K.B. (Kyu-Baik ) Hwang Art