Eighth Floor Artist’s Gallery
473 Broadway(Between Bloome & Grand Street),
New York, NY. 10013 Tel. 212 274 8993

For Immediate Release
November 10, 2002

Mee Ok Paik

November 26 – December 7, 2002.
Reception : Tuesday 26 November, 2002 6 – 8 pm

Eighth Floor Artist’s Gallery is pleased to present the work of Mee Ok Paik who reveals a remarkable sense of formal acuity as a painter. This solo exhibition is organized and curated by Elizabeth Park.
Ms. Paik’s unique reductive aesthetic explores the use of color relationships on large-scale surface or sometimes as a single monochromatic surface. In either case, her paintings are rich in texture and carefully considered in terms of their visual concept and scale. She intuitively
measures the space of her paintings through color. Through color in relation to form, she goes in search of the work’s visual equivalence.

In the past, Ms. Paik has worked outside the conventional pictorial surface so as to extend the painting, both visually and conceptually, outside the frame. In the exhibition, she presents new installation work, entitled “Life I-IV”(2002). She addresses the connection between the space of the painting and the space outside the painting. “Life I”-painted with acrylic on cotton–moves horizontally across the space of the canvas in two directions. The upper plane, painted in white, moves from right to left and then finally drops off the edge where it tumbles onto the floor. The ultramarine plane beneath it moves horizontally from left to the right where it finally tumbles to the floor on the opposite side. In ‘Life IV”- three vertical canvaes hang side by side from the ceiling to floor in the center of the gallery. Two ultramarine canvases flank a single white canvas on either side. The ultramarine bands rest on top of two flat ultramarine pedestals. The white band in the middle rests on top of a flat white pedestal. By seeing these installation together, two opposing
spaces are perceptually delineated: In the first case, the horizontal painting goes from the wall to the exterior space of the floor. In the second case, the vertical painting is separated into three equal bands that descend from the ceiling to floor as discrete elements, yet unaffiliated with the wall.

In each work, Ms. Paik makes clear the position of painting not as an image, but as a spatial intervention, as a place, and as a connecting element that defines the meaning of space– in aesthetic terms–as a transfiguration of nature. In this sense, she retains the special status of painting as sensory interlude amid the commercial chaos of our current information obsession