Platform: Annette Hur

For her first Platform exhibition Annette Hur (b.1984), South Korea- born and Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist, presents visceral, kaleidoscopic paintings that explore memory and body knowledge. Serving as a source of catharsis, this series of works reflects Hur’s inner turmoil of various memories and experiences conflicting with each other. 

The densely layered compositions are balanced with a striking simplicity of subject matter. This series reflects on the body’s ability to carry trauma that can be healed through nature, elements of which subtly appear through the imaginative landscapes revealing traces of life. Through the veils of form and colour the viewer begins to recognise the shapes of certain plants and animals like butterflies, racoons and lizards. Twisting and moving through the canvases these protagonists are animated, overlaid with distinctive brushstrokes that further enhance the sense of fluidity and motion. 

Entirely imaginative, these rhythmic and mesmerising paintings exist between abstraction and figuration, incorporating natural and recognisable motifs juxtaposed with less legible elements. Employing this idea of hiding and revealing, the artist explores and questions traditional and cultural binaries that are inherited in our identities. These works exemplify how our bodies carry these binaries as distant memories that spill out into peculiar imagery. As the artist further explains, “When l delve into bodily sensations and experiences as a female, Asian and first-generation artist, it’s inevitable to discuss discrimination, projections, and other identity-related traumas. But while my work speaks directly from my personal history, I also hope it doesn’t generalise an idea of what it’s like to be an Asian woman but shows a broader sense of our body’s ability to generate images in general; images of inexplicable memories that reside in our body.”