KB (Kyu-Baik) Hwang
Korean, b. 1932, Busan, South Korea

Kyu-Baik Hwang was by 1968 a well-established painter in Korea when he decided to seek new challenges in Europe. In Paris, he studied art history at the Ecole du Louvre and printmaking at the celebrated Atelier 17. Working with founder Stanley Hayter, among the most innovative and influential printmakers of the 20th century, Hwang mastered various intaglio techniques. By the time he moved to New York City in 1970, where he was to reside for thirty years, Hwang was primarily working in color mezzotint, a print medium to which he now devotes himself exclusively. With soft lighting and colors at once vivid and subdued, Hwang depicts familiar objects in surreal settings: chairs on the lawn cast shadows on what appear to be grey skies behind; reflections of a crescent moon peek from soup bowls on the grass; a wedge of watermelon floats among rolling hills of green. His "superb prints" present "a serene world of unexpected classical calm" while offering the viewer "new meanings, new recognitions, of the realities found in (them)" (Gordon Gilkey, Curator of Prints and Drawings, Portland Art Museum). Twice prize winner at the Ljublijana Print Biennale in the former Yugoslavia, and prize winner at the Bradford Print Biennale, England, Hwang has had numerous solo exhibitions in Japan, Korea, Yugoslavia, Germany, France, Norway, England and the United States.

Hwang’s work is found in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The British Museum, London; The National Gallery, Oslo; the Uffizi Museum, Italy; and the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, inter al.