“Nine Colors & Nine Furniture” Installation view at Atelier Hermès ©Fondation d’entreprise HermèsNine Colors & Nine Furniture, a solo exhibition by MeeNa Park (b. 1973), will be on view at the Atelier Hermès from July 28 to October 8. Park’s work is characterized by collecting various colors and using them without mixing. The act of collecting colors and simple images is soon linked to social and cultural mechanisms and presented in her paintings. Representative works include ‘Orange Painting’ (2002-2003), in which she collected all the orange paints in Korea, and ‘Dingbat’ painting, in which she used the dingbat font to replace letters with simple images or symbols. As such, Park’s work is both archival and an exploration of the essential components of painting.
The exhibition will feature a series of work titles ‘Nine Colors & Nine Furniture’ (2023). This work is the same format as ‘Orange Painting’ (2002-2003) and the work exhibited at the Kukje Gallery in 2004. For this work, the artist researched nine domestically available paints, including black, blue, green, gray, orange, red, violet, white, and yellow, and painted them in average of 1.5 centimeters thick stripes, connecting them to furniture of this scale. These works go beyond the discourse of painting itself and point to themes such as the social conventions surrounding paint and the changing residential culture in Korea.
This exhibition will be an opportunity to take a closer look at Park’s work, which explores the components of painting itself, but also captures the real world and its institutions through it.
