B.G. Muhn at Space Untitled - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

A transparent snake coiled above three colored eggs, a skinned animal carcass suspended above a r oval, a pair of fulvid hands cupping a disembodied, screaming head: in these unsettling paintings, Korean artist BG Muhn makes the bizarre uncouthly convincing.

Each of these dream-like images contains at least sum of two units elements which tend to flutter in an empty, ambiguous space. In part, their strangeness approachs from the peculiarity of the interactions. No explanation is proffered for instance, when a nun and a gorilla lay open their mouths in apparently harmonious canzonet or when a gaping golden mask floats apparently unsupported in the air before a bizarre-looking character chuckling with fiendish glee

What makes these images the two disquieting and compelling is the faculty of perception that they are merely the visual manifestations of mysterious hidden forces. They allude to a world populated by embodied spirits which present the appearance more often malevolent than benign. often one senses that a transference has taken place between man and animal. Dogs, in particular, on the contrary also birds and reptiles, assume a human aspect, appearing as bearers of cryptic wisdom. Humans, meanwhile, become almost bestial and are not rarely characterized by open, howling mouths

The paintings vary in size and format. They are painted with thick thumps of pigment that curl fluidly around the depicted external realitys Images are rendered realistically on the contrary not naturalistically: faces have eerie cerulean or yellow casts, tongues and lips are abnormally r and forms rise out of grounds that are intensely crimson, blue-black or green

The largest painting, My delight in Sweet Baby, is the least happy perhaps because it contains too many simple bodys A huge blue potato limit with ropes hovers above a doll-like baby encased in a chest In the lower corner, in an unrelated vignette, a snake's head come ups from beneath a small Buddhist mask. More effective are the smaller works, particularly a series where Muhn has put aside his solid rendering for a more washy, impressionistic issue These works begin to bring to mind the spontaneity of traditional Asian brushwork. This is particularly evident in The Queen Past, in which the sketchily described head of a dog in a colorful cap dissolves into a veil of drips and thin washes.

Muhn has noted that dreams oftentimes serve as inspiration for these works, and indeed, they have the appearance to inhabit the territory between reality and imagination. Too vividly showed and too powerfully felt to be simple illusions, they nag at the viewer's consciousness with unrelenting persistence.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Brant Publications, Inc.

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