Chung Eun-Mo

Starting 13th March 2024, Monica De Cardenas Gallery presents an anthological exhibition by Chung Eun-Mo, Korean painter who has lived in Italy since 1987 and in Milan since 2019.

From the very beginning Chung Eun-Mo (*Seoul 1946) has transferred in her work a profound knowledge and inclination towards Modernism. Her practice focuses on a continuous search for new pictorial geometries in which original spatial structures coexist and are nourished by different color juxtapositions, actively involving the space around the canvas. Similarly to Malevič and Albers, Chung Eun-Mo has always been fascinated by mathematical and chromatic harmonies and the changing effects of light. The exhibition will present 20 works made between the 1990s and today.

Since the end of the 1980s, the artist has chosen to live in Italy, first in Rome and then in the Umbrian countryside, in Torre Orsina; since 2019, she has lived between Milan and Salento, another place dear to her. Chun Eun-Mo’s practice has always revealed the deep connection with these territories and environments, the history of Italian art, the atmosphere of ancient civilizations, architecture, landscape and light. Many of her works are abstract and poetic recreations of places that she has seen and experienced: sequences of shapes, patterns and color combinations with a strong evocative power which can enable an inner resonance in the viewer.

In the paintings of Chung Eun-Mo whether it be the irregular shapes as in the earlier works on in the regular, circular or rectangular format, the colour can be seen as a combination of "light, weight and pleasure”. It becomes the substance to give luminosity and build harmonious relationships. Composed of planes of color and light shifting softly, Chung’s works present a sensitive geometry differing from the normative order of Minimalist art; sometimes they overflow beyond the boundaries of the canvas to extend onto the walls and transform the real space.

Born in Seoul in 1946, in the mid-1960s Chung Eun-Mo moved to New York where she has continued her studies and received a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Pratt Institute in 1980. She has travelled frequently in different parts of Europe, and settled in Italy in the late 1980s. She held her first museum exhibition at the Lenbachhaus, Munich in 1992, and the acclaimed site-specific installation at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin in 1994. Chung Eun-Mo has had numerous solo exhibitions in New York, Rome, Munich, Dublin and Seoul. Recent shows include Assab One in Milan, 2017 and the solo exhibitions at Monica De Cardenas Gallery in both Zuoz and Milan, 2020 and 2022. Her works are included in important public and private collections.