Chae Eun Rhee - Paintings

Chae Eun Rhee (born in Seoul, South Korea) packs a whole range of images into her monumental paintings, creating ensembles in which time, media and history intermingle and intersect. As a result of Rhee’s astonishing skill as a painter, it takes some time to observe the fractures and inconsistencies in the paintings. But just at the point where the viewer is beginning to understand the artist’s game, a dizzying world of associations unfolds in which everything seems to be connected with everything else.

_{Chae Eun Rhee, A Song for the Unseen II, 2021, oil on linen, 162 x 260 cm, photo: © B Studio, courtesy of the artist}

Art critic Hans den Hartog Jager says of her work: 'Chae Eun’s work even occasionally recalls some pre-Enlightenment and pre-Renaissance western art, which was composed according to non-linear temporal and spatial paradigms unlike those we are accustomed to in today’s ‘enlightened’ world. But if you open yourself to it, as in the work of Chae Eun, there emerges a surprisingly fresh and exciting and seductive alternative scenario by which to perceive our world. More eternal. More universal.'

_{Chae Eun Rhee, Spiegel Im Spiegel, oil on linen, 163 x 259 cm, 2019, photo: © Bau Photo, collection Maya Meijer-Bergmans - De Doornburgh Collectie}

Chae Eun Rhee is currently based in Seoul and a resident at Seoul Museum of Art.  In 2020 she was guest artist at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. She herself studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work features in the collections of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Art Bank Seoul and in private collections the world over. In 2021 she got a commission work from Centraal Museum Utrecht. Her work was first shown in the Netherlands at EENWERK Gallery in Amsterdam.

In late 2020 Museum de Fundatie bought her painting The Moment Your Smile Fades Away for Overijssel provincial art collection.

 

_{Image header: Chae Eun Rhee, The Moment Your Smile Fades Away, oil on linen, 182 x 227.3 cm, 2019, photo: © Bau Photo, collection Museum de Fundatie (province of Overijssel), Zwolle and Heino/Wijhe}

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