Exhibition Information

B37Q
2020 (이미지 출처 = 스펙트럼갤러리) 160x165cm

Mars Lamp
2021 (이미지 출처 = 스펙트럼갤러리) 160x165cm

			As the third edition of the special exhibition series, Spectrum Gallery is delighted to present a solo exhibition of Seoul and Philadelphia-based artist Min Baek. 
The exhibition entitled is scheduled from 16th March to 10th April 2021. 
The title coins the term of an incandescent glass object. 
Within its transparent interior, the coloured liquid mixture moves upwards and downwards repetitively, stimulated by constant heating and cooling. 
Such chemical reactions of a lava lamp share Min Baek’s idea centred around the human body in an abstract territory. 
To Min Baek the body is not only a physical space but also an abstract one. 
The artist focuses on the concealed elements within the body such as circulation, accumulation, amalgamation and interruption. 
The execution of heterogeneous materials and multilayered structure on Baek's paintings conveys these bodily phenomenons and the chemical reactions within a lava lamp. 
The works are a result of an accumulation of coincidental variables: spraying, pressing, spilling and glazing on every layers of the paintings. 
On one hand, the surface is meticulously designed to display the entire process, but on the other, it interferes with any sense of clarity in helping the comprehension. 
By realising the mobile and unpredictable nature of the body, Min Baek’s works present “an image not for the present, but the next”.  
The artworks in express a wide variety of textures utilising diverse and unusual materials. 
The paintings push the boundary of inconsistency and unpredictability through techniques. 
Mica powder from stone minerals often used in crafts for pearlescent effect, and reversing the conventional “fat over lean” method to create a diffusion of paint is used. 
Such qualities are amplified in , where the colour scheme refuses complementary colour often used to present symmetry. 
Instead, the surface only contains metallic and warm shades of colour. 
Elsewhere, the cracked surfaces as an aftermath of various materials colliding and combined is another visually compelling element. 
The canvas offers a rich expression of painting, as the materials merge and clash on the surface.
Due to the COVID-19, the ever-changing and flourishing contemporary society seems to be decelerating. 
We hope that the liveliness within the artwork of Min Baek brings a fully-dimensional experience amidst the placid and ordinary days. 
- Spectrum Gallery Curator Young Eun Ahn -


Imagine touching and observing every bits of substance and phenomenon after a whirlpool of blending together and gushed onto the ground. 
A homogenous amalgamation appear before me, and yet, what I notice is their unevenness within; the impurities; the sticky against the soft, the coarse against the fine, the rising against the falling and the matte against the glitter.
The exhibition embarks on the idea of such internal incongruity, in which I reflect on the physical and psychological experience of the body as an embodied space that is mobile and accumulative.
Fully embracing the chance elements, each paint layer is guided by the idea of transparency and materialistic contradiction. 
Each layer cancels one another to reveal and interfere its trajectories.
The cause-and-effect then emerges tangible on the surface, and textures appear after accumulation and fermentation in similar ways a mineral forms its skin within its interior over time.  
- Min Baek -