Hanna Hur’s Corporeal Geometries

High-contrast swatches of red, black and white paint; meticulous grids of squares and circles; rhythmic resonances of symmetry and sequence. At first blush, Hur’s detached, minimalist paintings, on view in her solo exhibition ‘8’ at DOOSAN Gallery in Seoul, appear formulaic, even derivative. Linger awhile and they become captivating, disorienting, visceral. What lends them their singular potency is the way in which they function: as neither images nor objects, but portals that induce embodied modes of perception.

Four of the eight paintings on view – all titled Threshold (2024) – comprise a network of stripped-back geometric abstractions; each contains a translucent white rectangle layered over a ground of cadmium red, punctuated by black dots evenly spaced across the canvas. A delicately rendered, edge-to-edge square grid reinforces the overtly rectilinear sensibility of these works while also enabling subtle gradations in colour saturation that complicate the picture plane with an illusion of undulating depth. But it is the presence of each painting’s central rectangular form that invites more speculative inquiries. Do they denote human figures or primeval monoliths? Are they apertures or screens? They demand a closer look.

Hur’s paintings ineluctably lead viewers to draw near in order to discern their nuances, then stand back so that they can be viewed in their entirety. In ‘8’, these efforts are stymied by an unconventional exhibition design: four standalone walls, arranged to configure a compact square with gaps at the corners, serve as the artworks’ sole supports within an otherwise empty white cube. When gallerygoers act on the desire to enter the henge-like sanctum where the red grid paintings hang, the spatial constraints make it impossible to take in the complete view of any single painting without bumping into one of the others. So begins a continuous, messy negotiation of one’s body in relation to the exhibited works.

Four additional paintings are installed on the outside walls of this structure, requiring the viewer to walk around it. This inverts the dizzying effect of being surrounded by Hur’s works and precludes the ability to see more than two paintings at once – even if the viewer retreats to a corner of the gallery. Such conditions compel viewers to take up an unusually active manner of looking dictated by improvised strategies of movement: they must decide whether to move towards the canvas or far away from it, walk clockwise or counterclockwise, or take a shortcut right through the middle.

The two sets of paintings placed on this perimeter convey movement in terms of circulatory patterns. One pair adopts the same grid layout used in the red paintings but converts it into greyscale, and increases the contrast, yielding a checkerboard ground overlaid with spiralling red stripes that terminate in a small silver circle at the centre of the canvas. In the other pair of paintings, Hur substitutes this vortical model with an oscillatory one. Here, a silver circle centred along the painting’s upper edge anchors a vertical string of vaguely anthropomorphic shapes, which trace a broken sine wave over a gridded black ground. Although they render different trajectories, these four works evoke perpetual motion and indefinite return, chiming with viewers’ individual routes through the exhibition as well as the evocative title that the paintings share, Threshold.

On their own, Hur’s paintings suggest indeterminate spatial dimensions that are at odds with the visual language of order and regularity inherent in the grid. It is the physical experience of the exhibition’s built support structure – the surprising and inventive choreographies it elicits – that translates this geometry from the cognitive to the corporeal. The paintings are all the more absorbing for it.

Hanna Hur, ‘8’ is on view at DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul, until 21 December

^{Main image: Hanna Hur, Threshold (detail), 2024, colour pencil, acrylic, flashe and pigment on canvas over panel, 2 × 1.9 m. Courtesy: the artist, Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles, and Dracula’s Revenge, New York; photograph: Paul Salveson}