Gallery 2 presents Blitz, a solo show of Gunwoo Shin who unfolds surrealistic, multi-layered narratives, combining sculpture with painting in one two-dimensional space.
The exhibition brings together his six recent pieces of superb composition including his triptych Blitzkrieg. Stage where multiple narratives are unfolded Shin’s works display intricate collages of diverse spatial, temporal backgrounds, figures, and objects. He takes the motif of each concrete image and incident from his direct, indirect experience or the mass media.
The artist appropriates traditional modes repetitively appearing in religion, myth, and history, modifying them to suit modern times. His pieces look surrealistic and grotesque as an abrupt severance takes place, perspective appears distorted in space, and incongruous elements meet. The fusion of sculpture (solid) and painting (plane) His works show a unique structure fusing sculpture and painting. They are mainly in the form of adding three-dimensional reliefs to the two-dimensional planes such as walls, wooden plates, or metal plates. Because images in his work look different depending on the viewer’s visual angle, multiple viewpoints are formed between his works and viewers.
The artist raises the problem of ‘ambiguity’ in visual reality, blurring the boundaries between two dimensional and three dimensional through an outward extension of multiple perspectives and complex structures. This aspect is concretized in the work that looks like a lying man, if seen from a distance, and a heap of disused cars, if seen in close-up. His work embodies painting in a sculptural way by adding matter to matter. Clashes between the real and unreal Shin mainly addresses the ambiguity of distinction between real and false images, original and reproduction, and good and evil.
The theme of this exhibition, Blitz connotes the shock and enlightenment we feel when everyday objects suddenly appear different. A weird incident like the crossbreeding of animals in reality is depicted in a form of triptych representing the past, present and future. A figure is modeled after a work of the Ambushed series, his sculptural work which is also displayed at the show. Shin induces viewers to depart from conventional ways of treating reality or art through such devices. He stresses that things that seem to have no correlation are actually in cause-and-effect relationships, and we can discover the true world in events that are hard to believe are real or events that seem fictional.
