Ahn Hyun-Ju - contemporary Painting

Ahn Hyun-Ju is a South Korean artist who has been living and working in Germany for more than 20 years.

After studying sculpture in Seoul and painting and new media in Dusseldorf, Ahn Hyun-Ju ultimately focused on painting from early in the 2000s. She started out experimenting with different kinds of support materials for her painting, plastic, glass, textile, before finally settling on metal and particularly aluminum. The stability and neutrality of this material allows her to use very vivid colors which maintain their intensity. The artist likes to use these colors as a sort of release against everything we’re not allowed to do or say in today’s world. This is what gives her a feeling of freedom she tells us.

In her paintings, Ahn Hyun-Ju questions the painter’s very support : not only has she done away with the traditional canvas, but she occasionally deconstructs the formats producing totally irregular shaped paintings, very minimalist, right down to a strip no more than 8cm wide. The oddness of the formats and the three-dimensionality of the works, expressed by the aluminum support, virtually transform her paintings more into art objects or mural sculptures.

Heavily influenced by Minimalism, Ahn Hyun-Ju avoids a symbolic language and “the metaphor.” She is more interested in harmonious shapes and the composition itself. Producing the simplest of compositions possible, according to her, is the most difficult thing to achieve for any artist. To Ahn Hyun-Ju her art is a formal one, her personal experience does not enter into it. The significance of her painting is not of a symbolic nature but of a purely aesthetic one “what you see is what you see,” she concludes in quoting Frank Stella.

The work of Ahn Hyun-Ju has been regularly exhibited in Europe since the early 2000s, particularly in Germany and France, in different art galleries and contemporary art fairs.