Lot 667 D

The longing to advance to the end of the world above our earth seems immeasurable for the astrologers and physicists. Many phenomena of scientific theories have inspired the fine arts to fantastic image conceptions. This is also the case for the Korean artist SEO, who here constructs a dream reality in order to have a glimpse with the naked eye into a parallel universe. In concrete terms, it is about the existence of the black hole that the two Nobel Prize winners Stepehen Hawking and Kip Throne believed in since the mid 1970s, although the visiual representation had not been determined. In the meantime, it has been possible to depict the black hole in contrast to its visible surroundings - made possible namely by the light-reflecting gas which is attracted by the dark centre in a disc-shaped cortex. This moment of a highly complicated process, by no means visible to the naked yes, gives SEO the opportunity to take a romatic look at the phenomenon. While still studying under Georg Baselitz at the beginning of the new milllenium in Berlin, she began via painting to explore the themes and symbols of her new home. This includes not only the phenomenon of bizarre garden gnomes, but also the analysis of German painting with examples from Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Carl Spitzweg and not least Caspar David Friedrich. In paintings such as "Mönch am Meer" (Monk at the sea), "Mondaufgang am Meer" (Moonrise at the sea) and "Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer" (Wanderer across the sea of fog), SEO discovers not only Friedrich's romantically exagerated view into an infinite expanse, but the artist also allows her longing for the expanse of her faraway homeland to be felt with the quotation of central motifs of the Romanticist in her paintings, which she formulated in 2003 with works for "Meine deutschen Träume" (My German Dreams). To mix once again the longing gaze into a parallel word with Friedrich's central motif, as here, seems only consistent and throws a warm light on the unfulfilled longing of science, the endless gaze into the afterlife of our galaxy not yet made visible. In this respect, SEO's painting is a wonderfully romatic step on the way to absolute knowledge.

MvL