Solo Exhibition, Ayn S Choi

524 West 26th Street NYC

December 14th thru January 15th 2018

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Solo at 524 West 26th Street NYC 2017

Solo at 524 West 26th Street NYC 2017

Solace... an artist's chapel.  524 West 26th Street November 2-December 9th

Solace... an artist's chapel.  524 West 26th Street November 2-December 9th

https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/solace-has-aura-hallowed-ground/3829

https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/solace-has-aura-hallowed-ground/3829

Soonest Mended

 Selected works by

Ayn S Choi

Curated by David Rimanelli

April 20- May 4, 2016

Three soft columnar strokes of warm gray loom out of a ghostly white ground.  They’re pocked with thick clots of bright red and blue, a slash of yellow and, curiously, a black teardrop -- an odd half-representational shape, both ancient and contemporary, that calls forth, especially, a delirious range of associations from the classic era of American abstraction, the legacy of Gorky, Gottlieb, and Baziotes.  We seem suspended in what might be called the Post-War ethos -- but “Post-War” isn’t what it used to be.  These days it’s used to sell catalogue furniture and New York real estate as well as art – an upbeat branding add-on that still, if you listen closely, carries echoes of trauma, of millions of lives lost, of ascendant communism, and even, faintly, of existential despondency.  Ayn Choi’s project embodies the complexity of experiencing -- from two continents – what must still rank as the most self-contradictory of all self-contradictory periods, the moment that saw the publication of Irving Sandler’s The Triumph of American Painting.

But this isn’t the only moment that Choi’s work conjures up, only one of the most conspicuous.  Like Yoshihara Jirō and other artists of the Gutai collective in late-1950s Japan, Choi uses a ground-up, organic sensibility to stitch together a panoply of trans-historical moment/moods. A series of large unstretched canvases shares an intuitive relationship with both Clyfford Still (yellows and acid blacks) and with international movements like Arte Povera and even Beuysian Fluxus (a thin wire curls around a brighter-yellow shape like a tangling kite string trying to anchor the historical disparities of this complex project). The exertion of simple biomorphic forms, pullulating with erotic suggestion, breaks against Choi’s canvases. Other paintings hang loose, unstretched—skins of former lives, or garments that might cloth nascent possibilities. A colossal purple amoeba claws at us over the horizon, apparently ready to devour anything, even abstraction itself.  Another curly wire outlines a smudged black shape suggestive of some kind of vase -- as Yoko Ono says in a teacup context, “Ask a friend to help mend” – tagged with the triad of red, yellow, and soft chalky blue that reoccurs here in so many sizes and scales.  A spectral white-on-black smear threatens to eat its way out of its gold frame. The deeper we look into Choi’s work, the morewe see; this project, in all its complexity, realizes and portends things to come from an artist of profound sensitivity.  David Rimanelli 2016

 

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Vicente Todoli (former Director of Tate Modern) at Soonest Mended.  What an honor!.

 

 

 

Holiday group show at Lesley Heller Workspace in LES, NYC. December 2015

Ayn S Choi will be in an upcoming group show at the Cape Cod Art museum Museum December 2015.  

Ayn S Choi''s new medium portrait at MONA (museum of New Art) in Michigan 2015.  

 LABspace Group show:  The Egg, Portraits with Cindy Sherman and others.  Great Barrington, MA.  August 2014

I Kan Do Dat, a multi venue group show curated by Danny Simmons at Rush Arts Gallery in Chelsea 2014.  

The Last Brucennial curated by Bruce High and Vito Schnabel, March 7 2014-April 4, 2014.  http://www.brucennial.com/

Group show with IFAC, International Fine Arts Consortium, March 7-April 30, 2014.

Group show Pipe Dreams at ASC Project Space, Chelsea NYC. 2014

Solo show at Trask Galleries at the National Arts Club, NYC 2010. 

Please email to make appointment for viewing. ayn1ny@gmail.com