(PLEASANTVILLE, NY) -- Kyung Youl Yoon is having a solo exhibition at the Art Gallery at the Rockefeller State Park Preserve (125 Phelps Way, Pleasantville, NY), titled, “Cubic Inceptions & Mixed Media on Canvas 2,” now through September 28, 2022. This an exhibition of environmental grandeur, with glistening relief and colorful presence cascading in density, suggesting future metaphors. The exhibition is curated by Audrey Leeds. 

Yoon's approaches to material are in essence painterly forms, aluminum scraps molded and manipulated. The resulting cubic masses are strongly articulated as topographies; beautiful, unique environments: land, urban and rural, as one views from above in an airplane.

An abstractionist at heart, even when painting, there has always been poetry in his approach, accessing a sensibility formed in both East and West residences and studies.

There is an opening reception on Sunday, September 18 from 2:00pm to 4:00pm. The Art Gallery is open to the public daily, 9:00am - 4:30pm.

Kyung Youl Yoon, an artist living in New Jersey, dedicates his practice to the ‘Cubic Inception’ series of sculptural paintings. Yoon studied Painting, Sculpture, and Printmaking at the Facultad de Bellas Artes in Madrid, Spain, and held numerous exhibitions in the United States, Korea, China, and Spain since the 1980s, including the “Abstract Painting/Poetry of Metaphors” at the Shanghai Li Haisu Museum, the “The Intersection of Contemporary Art” at the Public Naeseorak Art Museum Korea, “A Symphonic Variation on Cosmopolitan Universality and the Quintessence” at the Seoul Arts Center Museum, Gallery Korea (Korean Culture Center, NY), Asia Society, “Este Y Complutense” (2-year traveling exhibition) ending at The Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art (M.E.A.C), Madrid National University of Spain, “Birds, Beasts & Bugs” at the Blue Hill Cultural Art Center (NY), Chelsea Art Walk, and the “Shades of Time, The Archive of Korean-American Artists, Part Two,” at the Korean Culture Center and the Queens Museum (NY). Yoon also had solo exhibitions at the Sylvia Wald Po Kim gallery (“Cubic Inception Series,” 2017) in New York and the Galerie Bhak (“Cubic Inception Series,” 2021) in Korea. He is currently exclusively represented by the Dongwa Ode Gallery and attended many art fairs, such as Art New York, Art Miami, and Art on Paper, etc. 

Yoons’ works are in the private and public collections of the Jeonnam Museum of Art (JMA) (permanent collection), Public Inje Naeseorak Art Museum (permanent collection), Liu Haisu Art Museum in Shanghai (permanent collection), and the China Shanghai Embassy in China, Embassy in Madrid, Spain.

Cubic Inception began as a response both to global climate change and to the alienation of contemporary urban life.  He began adding sculptural elements to his paintings to '“break the indifference of onlookers,” as he has written, “to create an exchange where the viewer begins to reflect on a new thought or idea that eliminates obscurity in the forms and creates personal meaning.”  The individual pieces become a large matrix of cubes forming a collection of ideas.  Each cubic piece takes the place of a brushstroke.  Each edge takes the place of a line.  The resulting masses of shapes suggest aerial views of industrial landscapes, articulated topographies of beautiful but implicitly hostile environments.  The Cubic Inception paintings brim with both metaphorical resonance and tactile allure.  Los Angeles-based critic and curator, Peter Frank, notes that the Cubic Inception paintings “extend Yoon’s painterly practice into sculpture, into a low relief of a kind that cannot logically be derived from painting.

IMAGE: Cubic Inception 07, 91 x 28" Aluminum and Mixed Media on Canvas, 2015