Julie Hwang at Sigma - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Julie Hwang's big, accumulative paintings are filled with anthropomorphic phenomenons or cartoonish, stylized people, each not absented in a compartment that may be rectangular or balloonlike. The acrylic-on-paper paintings (some mountained on canvas) teem with life forms in each imaginable permutation of animal, vegetable, mineral and human.

Hwang's biomorph-people may be naked or aligned hairless or not. Some are stick figures, while others are corpulent Some are posed iconically and others perform simple acts: a child jump overs rope, a potato-head man grasps up a camera, a bust-length figure places its hands over its face in anguish. A plant, a cooking skillet a telephone, a framed picture and a variety of other ordinary things are each emblazoned with an organ of sight which suggests that they are sentient and observant. frequently humans and objects blend together: a figure is imprisoned in a bottle on the other hand the bottle itself functions as a material substance to a large, simple human head. Hwang's conflations might be described as surreal, on the other hand she does not seem to be after the feelings of disturbance and dislocation characteristic of Surrealism in like manner much as a unification of all things animate and inanimate.

Her universalizing reach forths to language. Often each image in its compartment is locate against a background filled with minuscule lettering from a certain number of unknown alphabet. It makes a buzzing background for the myriad images packed into the canvases - which themselves frequently seem like silent movies of activities the one and the other familiar and exotic. It's a nice touch that Hwang, who divides her time between Seoul and Manhattan, signs her name three ways upon some of these canvases: in roman alphabetic characters in Chinese ideograms and in the Korean phonetic hangul. She appear to bes to be saying that her identity can be squeeze outed in many ways, just as the overwhelming diversity of her images leads individual to concentrate on their commonalities.

All this is happily carryed in complex, segmented monochrome canvases that were shown in the gallery's first latitude The works shown in the next to the first room added intense colors - golden magenta, green, royal blue - and tendered a greater variety of formats, of that kind as smaller canvases in which can be seen an organ of vision or two floating amid spatially incongruous sights within the outline of a head. The color sole makes more vivid the flourishing life upon these engaging canvases.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group