Whether it’s the atmosphere casting a haze or the fuzziness of memories and dreams, Guimi You’s lush paintings have an aura of wistfulness and quietude. The Seoul-based artist creates dreamy oil compositions that tap into personal experience, passing time, and how one gains perspective and reevaluates their needs or desires as they go through life.
You’s canvases are infused with elements of still life and landscape traditions, where anonymous protagonists reflect quietly in a garden, pause in a golden meadow, or stroll through a park in the rain. Cerulean shadows complement the magenta jacket of a woman strolling with her dog along a stream in “Spring Walk,” and a woman sits down at an easel in an open doorway in “Painting, Again.”
Several of the works seen here are included in You’s current solo exhibition, When the Sun Shines Again at Lehmann Maupin, a meditation on rediscovery and beginning again. “Conceived as a tribute to those who have returned to creating after time away, the works unfold through a recurring image of sunlight, an enduring symbol of clarity, renewal, and hope,” the gallery says.
The figures sometimes appear to blend into the backgrounds like secondary characters, while the spaces filled with objects, contrasting light, and portals take center stage. Individual faces are often obscured or shadowy, introspectively looking down or away. Some appear lost in thought, while others concentrate on a creative task, such as throwing pottery on a wheel or putting a brush to canvas. There is a somberness tinged with hope as You taps into the courage required to start anew.
The artist’s approach, the gallery says, “synthesizes East Asian pictorial traditions of evocation and atmospheric transparency with Western lineages such as Romanticism and Surrealism, positioning landscape not as an escapist subject, but as a space for reflecting on memory, subjectivity, and how we situate ourselves within the world.”
When the Sun Shines Again continues through August 14 in New York City.
