“WORK” (1967) is a color-field abstract painting that depicts a mountain visible in the far distance over a field with a yellow triangle and split faces colored in green, blue, and purple. Yoo looked at the landscape of his hometown and breathed it in deep within his own heart. He expressed this subjectively by simplifying the landscape into a geometric form of primary colors that clearly reflected his emotions.
Yoo Youngkuk (1916-2002) studied at the prestigious Seoul Second High School, Korea, currently Kyungbock High School, and later graduated from the department of oil painting at Bunka Gakuen University, Tokyo. Yoo took part in a number of group exhibitions and biennales at home and abroad including Bienal de Sao Paulo, International Japan Art Exhibition, and the World Contemporary Art Fair in celebration for the 1988 Seoul Olympics. He was the recipient of the best award at the Free Artists Award; National Academy of Arts Award; and the Precious Crown Order of Cultural Merit. Yoo served on the faculty of the College of Fine Arts at Hongik University.
Yoo Youngkuk has been well known as “the pioneer of Korean abstract art.” While he was studying in Japan, he was influenced by European modernism and consequently opposed against academicism, delving into geometric abstract works. One of his early pieces, “WORK” (1939), is a three-dimensional relief created by cutting wooden boards into various rectangular shapes before organizing them on canvas. Yoo recalled that, “I couldn’t feel any interest in things like figure drawing, and while I was looking for something new, I acquired some pieces of leftover board from a builders’ merchant, and I tried relief work with them.” One can find from his three-dimensional relief works and memoirs the experimental spirit of the European avant-garde in search of something new, as well as influences from Constructivism. After he returned from Japan to Korea, Yoo worked on geometric color-field abstract works with mountain motifs. The choice of mountains as a motif was his best alternative in order to pursue abstract art amid an environment hostile to abstract paintings at that time in Korean art circles. Yoo Youngkuk did not present nature as it was, but interpreted it in his own way, simplifying geometric form in primary colors, about which an art critic commented: “Yoo adapted the landscape―the subject matter that constitutes a meaningful set of symbols in Eastern culture―in a Western formative language in his own way.”
