Seund Ja Rhee (1918-2009) - Lot 74

Lot n° 74
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Estimation :
40000 - 60000 EUR
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Result : 51 200EUR
Seund Ja Rhee (1918-2009) - Lot 74
Seund Ja Rhee (1918-2009) Composition, 1962 Oil on canvas, signed and dated lower left 60 x 30 cm Provenance: Gift of the artist to her personal physician and by descent, Paris Seund Ja Rhee studied at Jinju Girls' High School in Jinju and Jissen Women's College in Tokyo Prefecture before being separated from her three children by the Korean War and leaving Asia to settle in Paris in the early 1950s. "I have nothing, I am nothing, I have just been reborn in another land", she said at the time as she discovered, without money and without speaking the French language, a whole new culture. She continued her artistic training at the Grande Chaumière academy with Henri Goetz and Yves Brayer. Her early painting was divided between the representation of her daily life in Europe and an aesthetic close to abstract art. The painting entitled La Neige sur la rue Vaugirard (1956) particularly caught the attention of the Parisian critics because of its dichotomy of dark and light colours and its tendency towards abstraction. In the following years - a period often referred to today as "Woman and Earth" - the artist also introduced simple geometric figures, such as the line, the triangle, the square and the round, which were used both as subjects and as backgrounds for the paintings. Although abstract compositions were rare in the 1950s, they became evident from the beginning of the following decade. This decade marked a turning point in the artist's practice, and the abstraction characteristic of his famous paintings began. Some of the dot patterns can be compared to the Aboriginal style, especially through the artist's use of wood as a support - she produced several dozen xylographs -. Prolific, S. Rhee died in 2009 leaving behind more than 1,300 paintings, 12,000 engravings and 500 ceramics, mainly in public and private collections in South Korea and France, notably those of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (South Korea) and the Centre national des arts plastiques (France).
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