Ruth Bachofner Gallery is pleased to present New Work, an exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Soojung Park.

In her current body of work, Soojung Park continues to create luminous linear abstractions that play on contrasts of various textures, flatness and space, buoyancy and heft. For this exhibition, Park includes larger scale aluminum-based work with her ongoing Plexiglas works, where she continues her vigorous process of layering bands of color in various thickness and saturations across surfaces.

Park's plastic works involve sandblasting, rubbing pigments and meticulously scratching lines into clear Plexiglas tablets. Both sides of the Plexiglas are worked and then stacked several inches thick using a laminating process to permanently fix them together. These works seem to generate light from within as ambient light penetrates and bounces between layers of her medium, allowing infinite perceptions to emerge. Some areas of Plexiglas remain untouched by the sandblasting process, giving off a smooth, reflective sheen. These areas of transparency allow thin linear windows into successive layers of Plexiglas below.

Conversely, Park's aluminum-based works, which stand at 10 feet tall and up to 10 inches wide, revel in their industrial weight. The installation of twelve panels strikes a dramatic chord set among the softer Plexiglas paintings. These pieces are also worked by sanding, scraping and painting, but here, pigment sits at the surface and have a more saturated and charged palette.

Soojung Park's tall aluminum panels next to the Plexiglas pieces creates a dynamic interplay of scale, textures and color. While a sense of formal contrasts endure throughout the exhibition, Park's work always draws viewers close in, where an intimate collaboration with her chosen medium is manifest. While the layered striations allude to landscape, a more intimate dialog develops within and between panels, bringing the work into a sculptural as well as a painterly realm. Viewers become immersed in the smoky spaces of the thick Plexiglas and the impressive scale and colors of the aluminum, while always being drawn back to the syncopated rhythms, both in the overall installation and the individual works.


For this exhibition, Douglas Bloom moves his focus from figurative work to landscape-based paintings. As with his figurative paintings, these works meld his observations of his surroundings with painterly and hard-edge interventions. The landscapes that comprise his current body of work shift away from realism to emphasize and dramatize the effects of light and atmospheric experience. His work pays tribute to art movements of the past, while being surely grounded in the present.

Each painting presents a variation on forest-based images. Instead of employing this fairly traditional subject as a vehicle of nostalgia or to articulate a narrative, Bloom treats the landscape in a more abstract manner. In most of the paintings, light is dramatically altered, fractured and splayed into quivered and smeared, albeit highly controlled, movements of paint. His palette shifts from warm and cool tones that have a naturalistic impression, to more saturated tones reminiscent of comic book graphics. This contrast moves throughout this body of work; shadows, tree trunks, the ground plane and streams of light are all game for Bloom to dissolve into hazy brushwork, or conversely, into hard-edge formal elements.

"While destroying the painterly pictorial surface," Bloom states, "a new photographic image is created. This, for me, is a metaphor for the destruction of traditional painting in favor of something new… The relationships I am creating between abstraction and representation bring together art history's past while at the same time originating a tributary into the contemporary."