Upstairs Gallery: Anna Jung Seo: Love Stories

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Anna Jung Seo
Love Stories

October 25, 2024 - January 10, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, October 25, 6 - 8pm

Rachel Uffner Gallery is pleased to present Love Stories, Anna Jung Seo’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Vivid in palette and dreamy in composition, Jung Seo’s intimate new body of work offers evocative, fleeting glimpses of romance.

Love Stories invites viewers to step into Jung Seo’s delicate, psychedelic world, where lovers kiss under magnolia trees, an adolescent boy waits longingly for his first love, and a single woman holds court with multiple suitors. Jung Seo’s playful, poetic vignettes are windows into the private moments of romance — momentary gestures, glances, and touches tinged with anticipation and tenderness. The sense of intimacy in Jung Seo’s work is heightened by her rich colors and lush textures, which create a palpable sense of presence. Her brushstrokes, bold and expressive, guide the viewer’s eye through the scenes, inviting them to linger on the details that make each moment striking – the soft curve of a petal, the interplay of light and shadow, the quiet tension between two figures.

Jung Seo’s artistic process begins with keen observation of moments she encounters in daily life on the streets of London. When inspiration strikes, she embellishes these everyday scenes into spellbinding narratives of longing and passion. In Rumour, an elderly man whispers affectionately in the ear of his younger lover while a group of onlookers gossip. Awash with deep magenta hues, this piece was inspired by a trip to a street market in South London where Jung Seo watched couples mingle in the bustling crowds and imagined their feelings and desires.

Often, Jung Seo’s figures are obscured by her fantastical landscapes, emerging only upon close looking and identifying the inconspicuous limbs and silhouettes. In multiple paintings, a pair of figures embrace under a magnolia tree, hidden by the veil of night. The dark outlines of their entwined bodies are concealed by the vibrant blooms in the foreground, spinning enchanting tales of star-crossed lovers and stolen kisses. Some enigmatic works contain no figures at all, like the frosty-hued Waves coming from you, in which a solitary black bird alights on a rocky outcrop by the sea. Smoky, purple-blue waves roll in and fall back unceasingly, evoking a temporal sense of isolation; in the distance, another bird flaps silently away into the golden horizon.

Jung Seo’s canvases are notably intimate in scale, which not only reflects the intensity and expressiveness with which she paints but also creates a voyeuristic experience for the viewer, drawing them physically closer to the subjects in the scenes as if spying on a secret exchange. The small size of the paintings reinforces the ephemerality of its narratives, which were transformed through Jung Seo’s fantastical imagination from mundane observations into poetic vignettes of love, desire, and the complexity of human relationships.

Trained in the study of French literature, Jung Seo spent years as a university lecturer on the subject. Hence, storytelling is at the very heart of her artistic practice. Love Stories is a heartwarming body of work that imagines with a sense of wonder the romantic encounters that are deeply personal yet universally resonant, and always, somehow, magical.

Anna Jung Seo (b. 1964, Seoul, South Korea) explores the notion of distance in different spheres: psychological and emotional distance within people and geographical and physical distance between places and people. Her small scale paintings capture an impression of people’s daily lives in the streets, trains, pubs, and markets of South London. Jung Seo’s paintings developed out of an interest in the intimate moments of people, as she explores and reveals the concealed layers of human relationships.

Jung Seo received her BA, MA, and PhD from Yonsei University, and her honorary BA from City & Guilds of London Art School. Recent solo exhibitions include Love Stories, Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, NY; Keep in Touch Seoul, Seoul, South Korea; Gongjaksaebang, Seoul, South Korea; and The Stone Space, London, UK. Jung Seo has participated in group exhibitions at venues such as Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, NY; V.O Curations, London, UK; Union Gallery, London, UK; The Curators Room, Amsterdam, Netherlands; C4RD, London, UK; A.P.T Gallery, London, UK; Royal Academy, London, UK; and James Fuentes Online, New York, NY. Jung Seo received the Brian Till Art History Prize For Humanities Thesis in 2011. She has been an artist-in-residence at PADA Studios & Residency in Lisbon, Spain, and the Florence Trust Residency, London, UK. Jung Seo currently lives and works in London, UK.