The Brooklyn Rail

For Two Angels, her recent show in Los Angeles, Hanna Hur installed twinned paintings on opposing walls, a pew cleaving but also conjoining the gallery at its midline like a wooden spine. In this, Hur’s installation redoubled the bilateral symmetry of each paired diptych; the panels form discrete mirrors rather than imprints of themselves, acknowledging the obdurately physical seams across which the geometries spread, contiguous but punctuated. And indeed, Hur hung Angel and Angel ii (all works 2023) with just a slight breath between their respective, abutting panels, rendering conspicuous in this detail the sliver of space in between. Sitting on the long bench forced one to choose which direction to face, with the modulated tangerine and cotton-candy pink grid of Angel at left or the stark black and white checkerboard of Angel ii differently throbbing at right. Whichever one picked, the other exerted an ineffable presence—an experience of inexorability characterized by being attended by something that exists irrespective of your regard, even as it solicits it. This is an effect of size (these works are so giant as to constitute their own environment) as well as scale, playing part to whole. Each square establishes a pictorial unit and dutifully comprises the grid, performing what Rosalind Krauss famously characterized as the centrifugal force of the device to propel forms outward—or to anyhow intimate the possibility, however hypothetical—thus “compelling our acknowledgment of a world beyond the frame.”

The situation at Kristina Kite abetted this implication of internal expansiveness opening out, what with the towering white walls and harlequin floor, a vertiginous readymade that has never looked better than it does in this show. Yet Hur’s paintings do this job on their own too, pulsing in excess of their materials and literal finitude. As with so much undulating Color Field painting that is far stranger and queasy-making than oft-acknowledged—acting upon vision that is necessarily embodied—or Op art’s more forthrightly violent assaults, Hur’s works insinuate the somatic in the perceptual. Engagement is neither discreet, nor passive. Angel and Angel ii are as hard to look at as they are to look away from. Her colors are hot, even when cold, and fast. The last obtains in the act of looking despite the method through which Hur achieves them being so contrary to their result. These come into themselves slowly and with methodical planning that could go awry with any procedural hiccup. Hur’s process starts not only on each support, but elsewhere, before, in drawings (here shown in a representative suite of new pieces on paper in the back gallery, cloistered beyond the main room). In her drawings, Hur begins with a 1/4" grid, mapped and then interposed with O’s that produce a flickering binary of square and circle; some layer further patterns atop the ground, and some likewise feature reappearing lexical elements. Recurring in this selection, for example, are twinned fragments—squiggly, writhing, and translucent lozenges—that exist in the small colored pencil on paper, Muse xi, and also Visitor iv, together with the spiral Muse x, where they cross at the pinwheel’s center. (For its part, the animating spiral recurs in the verdant Sun vi.)

Back in the paintings, Hur mixes the ground color first in a thin, runny acrylic wash that anchors the application of the grid she then lays down. Angel and Angel ii feature the titular iconography resting atop the surface. Attenuated vertical body chambers broaching the two stretchers, where they meet, reach away from the inner edges in long rectangles; these ambiguous features suggest stuttering or replicating horizons as much as outstretched arms. The compositions invite the fundamental parallax of illusionism shorn of recognizable if insistently abstract figures, coming forward, being submerged, and asserting themselves anew. Hur’s invocation of sentience cues precedents of belief in images that are worked for, and that work, as in the tantric traditions with which her work converses. Hur’s angels—if no more or less than the equally vital grid—seem to have been coaxed but also recognized, almost ceremonially, in the course of making. (For a presentation for Frieze Los Angeles in 2023, Hur framed the selection, anchored by an altar-like sculpture—a gridded plinth blanketed in chainmail, rising topographically from the base—in terms of a 2019 trip to South Korea where she participated in what she has described as a Shaman-guided ritual appeasement of her ancestors.) In her current press release, Hur writes of the routine and mind-emptying discipline of image making as an “act of submission”:

Repetitive gesture becomes a petitioning of the gods for the image to come near. When a form begins to come into focus, it is unwieldy and thwarts the gaze. The image demands a total relinquishing of self, of vision even. When it allows for its body to be seen, it appears only through a mirrored reflection of itself. The original image will not be looked at directly, it requires mediation, refraction.

The sun, blinding; these are Hur’s metaphors. As for the works that enact the same, they are impervious, all the more forcefully self-possessed in one’s memory, as absence.