Eel Kwon Kim says of his work:
“My images are full of the vibe of representational minimalism; they are not in their platitude to be read as formal exercises but rather as content-laden themes that contain nature and are also emotional realities for creating order in nature».
Eel Kwon Kim's paintings are reminiscent of the works of Mark Rothko, but unlike the latter, who excluded any form of figuration, it is indeed stylized, ghostly horizons that Eel Kwon Kim paints, spectral horizons, blurred by a sfumato leaving guess an emergent structure. Each painting is titled by a specific date, recalling the “Day Paintings” of the Japanese painter On Kawara. However, Kim's dates do not seem to denounce events but rather evoke a metaphysical apprehension, a horizon separating space, the earth from a twilight sky, or separating time, on the date of the painting, a blurred semantic horizon separating or joining the figurative and the abstraction. Beyond Korean minimalism and abstract expressionism claimed by Eel Kwon KIM himself, we can also associate a form of symbolic metaphor.
Eel Kwon Kim was born in 1962, he is a professor at Chon Nam University in Seoul, a master of the New York Academy of Art Graduate School, and a PhD from So Gang University, The Graduate School of Communication Art.Ph.D. He has participated in nearly a hundred collective and solo exhibitions. His art is actively traded on Christie’s and a dozen other platforms.