Hyeseung Marriage-Song: “FRANKENSTEIN: KÖNFIDENTIAL” ↬ 15—18 November 2018

The Vanderbilt Republic very proudly presents “FRANKENSTEIN: KÖNFIDENTIAL”,
an exhibition of new works from award-winning realist painter Hyeseung Marriage-Song.

Co-created with author/educator Tommy Zurhellen, the experience
— an immersive response to a manuscript, with curation & lighting design by George Del Barrio –
opens at 6p Thursday 15 November 2018 and will be on view to the public through Sunday 18 November 2018
at Gowanus Loft, a project space dedicated to the conception and production of immersive 
creative encounters by commission, collaboration & special arrangement. 

FRANKENSTEIN: KÖNFIDENTIAL is Ms. Marriage-Song’s 1st solo exhibition at the Loft. 

Created over the past 10 months, these large-scale paintings and monoprints
are inspired by Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” (1818) and Zurhellen’s own imaginative retelling
of her classic tale, taking the age-old myth of the golem into the 21st century. 

This unique project goes beyond the dyadic collaboration between Zurhellen and Marriage-Song,
harnessing the spirit of individuals who are mighty figures in the art world themselves, including:
Sir John Richardson, Vin Ganapathy, Chris Rubino and Michael Gormley. 

Marriage-Song’s contemporization of the golem myth
seizes also on the omnipresence of creativity, light and darkness in all humans.

We know that Viktor Frankenstein is driven to create something out of nothing;
at base, then, he is an artist, for that is the artist’s life — to form out of the raw
what must ultimately go out in the world, making a life of its own.

Though Boris Karloff’s interpretation of the monster lives still fresh in our minds,
Marriage-Song in this project wanted to convey an image of the golem as beautifully complex,
intelligent and tattooed — a modern play on the suturing together of the
cemetery cadavers that Shelley’s scientist-artist was driven to. 

These paintings were not made as direct illustrations of the plot of Zurhellen’s or Shelley’s books.
They are, instead, psychological and philosophical meditations of those texts and the myth of the golem. 

Zurhellen’s characters are portrayed psychologically, with the action of the story reflected
in the visual idiom of unsettled and fractured forms, swirling circularity,
brushwork that is at times resolved and at others broken.

The manipulations of art convention serves Marriage-Song’s vision that every generation
creates copies of themselves which are let loose upon the world, and then those,
inevitably becoming artist-makers themselves, create again, and so on and so forth,
thereby making us all a little bit monster, a little bit artist;

Who knows, and cares, which generation we are in this process?

FRANKENSTEIN: KÖNFIDENTIAL

A SOLO EXHIBITION OF NEW WORKS BY THE ARTIST

curation & lighting design 
GEORGE DEL BARRIO

communications &strategy
KATE HARVIE

art advisory
JOHN GAGNÉ

project space
GOWANUS LOFT

[ Opening reception 6—9p on 15 November 2018 with open gallery hours
from 11a-7p on 16—18 November 2018 at Gowanus Loft.
For catalogue information or to schedule a private gallery visit, please contact George Del Barrio ]