Kunsthalle Düsseldorf

MUR BRUT 26

Curated by Juliane Hoffmanns

For the 26th edition of the project series MUR BRUT, Jeehye Song has created a work for a wall in the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf parking garage at Grabbeplatz 4.

Her paintings read like a diary in which she makes space for her own emotions and processes them. Caricature-like, sometimes cute and at first even funny, the protagonists in Song’s paintings are apparently unable to master their everyday tasks. Completely limp, they stick their heads into the canvas, disappear into the sink, or hang out of the window. Through the humor inherent in her paintings, the artist manages to reduce the distance that often exists between the artwork and the viewer.

In tschüss, Jeehye Song moves between reality and fantasy and attempts to expand her pictorial style. For the first time she brings her paintings to life in three dimensions, giving them a more tangible appearance. The work, which consists of painting and sculptural elements, is processual and changes over time. In a tragicomic way, limbs disappearing into the wall and emerging from it suggest an escape from the parking garage, which always remains the same, an escape from reality. At the same time, tschüss is meant to break up everyday life in the parking garage in the dark, cold winter. The people who pass through there on a daily basis are given brief moments of distraction, while at the same time the proximity of the subject gives them the possibility of identification, so that they can process what they see on a personal level.

Jeehye Song studied Painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and graduated in 2021 under Andreas Schulze.