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Lot Essay
During the 1950s, Rhee Seundja studied oil painting at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where Chinese masters of abstract art such as Zao Wouki and Chu Teh-Chun studied. During this period, she vigorously absorbed diverse techniques of oil paintings, seeking her own palette and compositional forms, and achieved an outstanding development in a short amount of time. For instance, Rhee's work was displayed at the National Museum of Paris in 1956, and it drew the attention of a noted art critic Georges Boudaille. He volunteered to write a review for her. After the exhibition at the National Museum of Paris in 1956, Rhee gradually moved onto abstract painting. She reinterpreted the landscape as she saw it and recomposed it upon the reflection of her own mind. Rhee's magnificent oeuvre can be generally divided into five periods: transition from figuration to abstraction (1953-1958); Woman and Earth series (1958-1968); Geometric abstractions and abstract landscape (1969-1979); Road to the Antipodes series (1980-1994); and Cosmos series (1995-2009).
Rhee Seundja successfully positioned herself as an abstract painter in the intensively competitive art world in Paris during the 1950s. A noted French writer Michel Buto, who was one among many enthusiastic supporters of Rhee emphasized the importance of nature, saying that it has been the core source of inspiration in Rhee's art throughout her artistic career. Her work is a mesmerizing variation of nature, shifting from figurative to abstract styles. Michel Buto liked to call her "our ambassadress of the dawn." Buto felt that Rhee's art connected Korea, motherland of her birth where she was born and lived until the age of 32 to France, motherland of her artistic career where she established her success as an abstract painter and lived until her death in 2009. Buto wrote in the catalogue of her retrospective exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea in 1988, "Seundja, you saw every inch of France. As much you touched stones, listen to streams, climbed the rocks, picked flowers and leaves everywhere in France, as the landscapes and legends of France in your paintings, prints and potteries will continue to have conversations with those in your motherland, Korea."
Rhee Seundja successfully positioned herself as an abstract painter in the intensively competitive art world in Paris during the 1950s. A noted French writer Michel Buto, who was one among many enthusiastic supporters of Rhee emphasized the importance of nature, saying that it has been the core source of inspiration in Rhee's art throughout her artistic career. Her work is a mesmerizing variation of nature, shifting from figurative to abstract styles. Michel Buto liked to call her "our ambassadress of the dawn." Buto felt that Rhee's art connected Korea, motherland of her birth where she was born and lived until the age of 32 to France, motherland of her artistic career where she established her success as an abstract painter and lived until her death in 2009. Buto wrote in the catalogue of her retrospective exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea in 1988, "Seundja, you saw every inch of France. As much you touched stones, listen to streams, climbed the rocks, picked flowers and leaves everywhere in France, as the landscapes and legends of France in your paintings, prints and potteries will continue to have conversations with those in your motherland, Korea."