Gallery Hyundai presents Park Ko-Suk and Mountains in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Park who has been widely known as the artist of the mountains. This exhibition features the artist’s cardinal works selected from his comprehensive oeuvre including: expressionist paintings from 1950s and 1960s; abstract paintings from the period when the artist was actively participating as a member of the Modern Art Association; works in which its sole subject was the mountains in the 1970s and 1980s when he began to hike and thereby taking mountains as his exclusive subject matter, and works of his later years in the 1990s.

His experiences of the bleak conditions of life during his refuge in Busan in the 1950s resulted in his use of violent and bold outlines, and the characterization of his paintings as expressionist is grounded in his use of the thick texture and intense colors. Afterward, Park abandoned the tendency of realism seeking a certain new and unconstrained visual language as he founded the Modern Art Association together with Han Mook, Hwang Yeomsoo, Lee Kyusang, and Yoo Youngkuk. After he experimented with abstraction for a while, Park started to hike mountains in the second half of the 1960s. As a natural result, he embarked on the production of paintings of mountains. Here mountains are not objects to be seen by who sees. Rather, they are what the subject who sees it becomes. And the outputs of this dialectical mechanism are embodied via the vitality of his brushwork and his inimitable use of colors.

This exhibition enables one to gain a new understanding of the works of Park Ko-Suk whose role in the history of modern and contemporary Korean art was imperative. At the same time, it is hoped that the interest in and discourse on his art will be reactivated.