Carl Kostyál is delighted to present New York-based South Korean artist HyeGyeong Choi’s ‘Food Coma’, her debut exhibition with the gallery, after featuring in the group show ‘Through a Glass Darkly’ at Carl Kostyál Milan last summer.
For her first solo exhibition in Europe, Choi presents a new series of paintings in which she delves into riotous fantasies of bounty and indulgence, exploring subsconscious desire while questioning societal expectations of the normative body.
Latter day Bosch-esque dreamscapes realised in wild neon palettes are peopled with joyously gluttonous figures devouring chicken thighs and gorging on exaggeratedly long strands of spaghetti. Choi almost sculpts her amorphous forms, using thick layers of impasto applied with a spatula to as well as a paintbrush to give corpulent life to her subjects. Her voluptuous figures luxuriate unapologetically in their bodies and their appetites, apparently unaware of being witnessed in their private reveries.
Choi’s fluid visual language is underpinned by a technical rigour developed over years of training and experimentation and an imagination fuelled by a fascination with the grotesque and the surreal as conduits through which to celebrate new bodily expressions outside the gender binary.
Hyegyeong Choi (b. 1986, Seoul, South Korea) holds a BFA from Chung Ang University, Seoul, and an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been the subject of solo presentations at Harper’s, Los Angeles (2022); Shelter Gallery, New York (2021); Slow Gallery, Chicago (2020); Stolbun Collection, New York and Chicago (2018 and 2015). Most recently, she has participated in group exhibitions at CHART, New York (2021); Harper’s, Los Angeles, and East Hampton (2021); Anton Kern, New York (2021); and Adah Rose, Washington, D.C. (2019).
Reviews of her work have appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, and Chicago Tribune, among other publications.
Photo by Eva Herzog © the artist. Courtesy of Carl Kostyál, London | Stockholm