SEO
Wetterling Gallery proudly presents the second exhibition with internationally known artist SEO. With her roots in Korea and based in Berlin since 2001, SEO connects two cultures and traditions and creates a quite unique expression.
Globalization and its impact on humans and their environment is a subject significant for SEO’s oeuvre. “I have always made the theme of globalization and its impact on the environment, culture and people, the center of my works.”*
Environments that at first glance look like a rice field in Korea, remind us at a second gaze about a sunflower field in France. The environments and cultures are intertwined and create new worlds. In the exhibition Global Things -The Long Way Back in 2014, paintings from her series of rice fields were exhibited, artworks that made SEO internationally known and widely appreciated.
One of SEO’s distinct features is the unique way of combining painting and collage techniques. By gluing thousands small pieces of very delicate paper on the canvas one by one, she almost creates an expression that is close to three-dimensional. In addition she paints the canvas with acrylic paint in intense and expressive colors.
In SEO’s new exhibition The Doubling of Reality, landscapes from all over the world recur, but here including architectural structures that create new rooms and indicate new environments. Each artwork is composed by several levels, where each section can be interpreted as a part of our globalized world; countries, environments and cultures merge and transform into different shapes. Landscapes and people that usually inhabit a culture are placed in a different context in SEO’s works. The architectural structures strongly remind us of the worlds of computer games. The impression is fractioned and instable, the spaces move and buckle. The reality is rarely unequivocal, more so is it based on additional stories.
”Man creates through increasing impact on nature through technology and information technologies a growing constructivist reality in which living spaces and cultures are put more quickly in new and hitherto unexperienced relationships.”**
*SEO, Die Teilung der Unendlichkeit (Text sketch) 30.11.2015
**Ibid.