Artist: Hanna Hur
Exhibition title: The Lovers
Venue: Roberta Pelan, Toronto, Canada
Date: February 12 – March 20, 2016
Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Roberta Pelan, Toronto
From beneath the down of inaction she listed among her pain a broken heart. Her arms could not lift, neither; her body was laid out. But these were the things that were already broken.
Can a painting heal me, she asked?
Can a drawing speak?
Housebound, her fingers moved across pencils and pages, canting at windows.
I am going a long way
With these thou seëst – if indeed I go
Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,
Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies
Deep-meadowed
Where I will heal me of my grievous wound.
Down where her pictures lie, I saw the chassis planed out. The canvas like bone with its pilose skin taut. Then the washes, like fingers on the pulse points, tapping to code. Matisse in the shadows; Merleau-Ponty, Tennyson, and want. I saw knotted effort, a spirit looping.
There were faintest veins; light beneath my eyelids; cracking ice. She drew paper wings and perfect circles, and then, like a prairie province, the place of absence, mapped out.
– Sky Goodden
Hanna Hur (b.1985, Toronto, Canada) lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include Tomorrow, New York; Shanaynay, Paris; Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto; Galerie B-312, Montreal, Canada; The Power Plant, Toronto; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Jr. Projects, Toronto.
Hanna Hur, The Lovers (The Water), 2016
Hanna Hur, The Lovers (The Mountain), 2016
Hanna Hur, The Tower, 2016
Hanna Hur, The Lovers, 2016