Park Seo Bo: Ecriture: Chateau La Coste

Imagine stepping into a gallery that cantilevers off a steep hillside, floating in the forest. The bright Provence light sifts inside with you, and its rays wrap the artworks like a glaze. The opening show of the Richard Rogers Drawing Gallery, nestled in Château La Coste of France, presents Park Seo-Bo’s Ecriture. It is, for the first time in its history, exhibited at an art hub in nature, woven into the tapestry of a densely wooded ridge.

Park Seo-Bo (b.1931) is a pre-eminent abstraction artist who played a pivotal role in the development of post-war Korean art. At the start of his career in the mid-1950s, Park was moving away from representation and conventional painting techniques of that time. He claimed a primordial aesthetic, often with a dark and gloomy palette. It was his way of coming to terms with the wake of war, in which Korean society was gathering its ravaged fragments. Then, around the end of the 1960s, Park sought to make art that was categorically new. He had outgrown the fervour of young avant-garde artists, and it was at this juncture of change that the Ecriture series was formulated.