Lot 836 D

Oil on canvas 162.5 x 130 cm, framed.

With written confirmation from Martine Kim, via Email, dated 11.10.2013.

Provenance: Fondation Veranneman, Kruishoutem; Private Collection, Belgium

Kim Tschang-Yeul is one of the most important Korean artists, alongside Nam June Paik. Born in North Korea in 1929, Kim Tschang-Yeul was initiated into the art of calligraphy by his grandfather when he was only a child and studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Seoul until the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. To overcome the traumatic experiences of the war, he moved to New York in the late 1960s where he was influenced by American Expressionism and especially by Mark Rothko's atmospheric colour field paintings. 1970 was to become a decisive year for the artist, as it marked his move to Paris where he met his wife, Martine Gillon, and where he developed the dominant theme of his art - his famous drops of water (see Philippe Sergeant, Kim Tschang-Yeul, Paris 2008, p.289/297). Since then Kim has worked on each subject with an untiring tenacity. Sometimes this meant covering an entire canvas with a sea of drops, while sometimes he focused purely on the hyper-realistic depiction of a single drop. Yet his works always oscillates between trompe l'oeil and still life and can therefore never be assigned to a specific genre. This painting is one of the artist's rare dark works, with an almost monochrome surface that contains a subtly executed island of drops in the lower left-hand part. The drops initially give the pictorial space a clear definition, but then the sheer size of the painting and its blackness - which only turns dark grey in a small number of places - opens up this space towards infinity. What remains is a feeling of contemplation and harmony.