An exhibition of Yoo Youngkuk, regarded as the first Korean abstract painter, takes over various rooms of Fondazione Querini Stampalia, including spaces that Carlo Scarpa famously remodelled in the early 1960s. Organised by the Yoo Youngkuk Art Foundation and curated by Kim Inhye, a curator at Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, the exhibition offers a compelling presentation of the work and life of an artist who lived between 1916 and 2002.




It spans three floors, with the visitor working their way up from Carlo Scarpa’s ground floor, a space designed not to compete with the city’s water and flooding but accept it as part of the architectural site, utilising the exhibition space with a floor of washed concrete slabs and walls of Istrian stone introduced by Scarpa. Here, plinths present Yoo’s lithographic works as a gentle introduction to both the building and artist, the garden view opening conversations with the gestural landscape forms in Yoo’s works.

 

Many visitors to this Venice show may not have encountered Yoo Youngkuk previously, though now widely considered the pioneer of Korean abstract art. A presentation in the first floor portego outlines the artist’s biography and key life moments with artworks alongside vitrines and display cases of artefacts and cuttings. The story of the artist’s early life is explored, exploring Yoo’s studies in Tokyo in the mid 1930s, establishing himself first in Japan before returning to Korea in 1943, just before the end of Japanese rule. The artist’s experimentation and sculptural exploration is presented across models, sketches, and tests while presented paintings 


After returning to Korea, Yoo had returned to his mountainous hometown of Uljin, but within emerging autocratic regimes, found himself – as with many Korean intellectuals and artists who had studied in Japan – shadowed by the Special Police of Tokyo. To avoid their surveillance, Yoo worked as a fisherman, heading out into the ocean, a shift away from his art practice only furthered with the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950. After the end of the war, Yoo and his family moved to Seoul and the artist devoted himself to painting.




Yoo had said that he liked abstract painting as it has no words, though his canvases do carry a subtle sense of semantic play and drama. On the third floor of Fondazione Querini Stampalia, a greater curation of Yoo’s work is presented. The majority of these works date from the 1960s and 70s, after Yoo’s move to Seoul, with an emphasis on elements of landscape and nature clearly present amongst the geometric and ordered compositions. Motifs recur across the works, suggesting Yoo’s interest in shifting perspectives used in East Asian landscape painting: the high perspective, looking up at a mountain from ground level; the deep perspective, overlooking layers of mountain ridges from above; and the level perspective, gazing at mountains in the distance.

The works here are extractions of landscape and nature – including memories of the Uljin mountains and oceans. They are also, however, profound studies in composition, colour, and texture. These works act as a representation of place, but also of his inner self – in a 1996 interview with Monthly Art magazine, Yoo said: “The mountain changes whenever I look at it. Ultimately, the mountain is not something that lies ahead of me, but something that lies within me.”



Departing the exhibition offers another opportunity to return to Carlo Scarpa’s semi-submersible ground floor, and revisit Yoo’s works with eyes now attuned to the artist’s history and wider practice. Then, a visit to Carlo Scarpa’s immaculate garden of Fondazione Querini Stampalia – itself a game of interjecting geometry and structure within mannered ideas of nature that in some ways continues Yoo’s themes beyond the exhibition spaces.