Julia Jo: Beckon

Charles Moffett is pleased to present Beckon, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Brooklyn-based, South Korean-born artist Julia Jo. This marks the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. The show encompasses 15 new paintings — all on the artist’s signature square canvases, ranging in size from the intimate 10 x 10 inches to the monumental 80 x 80 inches.

Confronting a Julia Jo painting calls to mind the classic Greek myth “Theseus and the Minotaur.” Each painting is a labyrinth unto itself. Playing the part of master craftsman Daedalus, Jo paints in beguiling oscillation between figuration and abstraction, her sweeping, calligraphic brushstrokes and evocative palette drawing the viewer deeper and deeper into the painting's emotional landscape. Yet Jo also plays the role of Ariadne, giving Theseus, us the viewer, the ball of thread to find our way through the, at times dizzying, but ultimately meditative and transformative, journey of her work. The open vulnerability of a face, the tenderness of a kiss, the mournfulness of eyes closed or the yearning of an outstretched hand — these forms emerge as one travels through Jo’s paintings, demanding our close and sustained looking and rewarding us with rare time spent in quiet contemplation and personal reflection. Jo gives us the clues, yet what we see is up to us, the perspectives and experiences we carry with us to each painting.

Jo’s practice has long excavated the rich terrain of multifaceted emotional possibilities and conceptual interpretations present within the intersection of the figurative and the abstract. Taking inspiration from memories of her own interpersonal misconnections and experiences of human communication’s inevitable failings, Jo begins each painting by sketching a largely figurative composition in oil directly onto the canvas. The forms often comprise exaggerated bodies and faces, immersed in heightened human relationships of all manners — amorous, hostile, familial, fraught — and occasionally contextualized with outlines of familiar objects. For passages in many of the paintings in this show, she painted wet-on-wet, infusing the surfaces with a tempting tactility, and with each new layer of oil paint, Jo obscures, fractures, and reconstitutes the picture facing her. This delicate process of building and collapsing the composition elevates the final painting beyond her personal narrative to a higher plane of universal human emotion.

For her newest body of work, Jo has partially freed herself from the corporeal and focused her attention more squarely on the human face - zeroing in on our most expressive features, examining how one can beckon, embrace or reject another through a swift expression alone. Propelled by a fascination with the notion of monumental vulnerability, the artist explores what that human condition can look like, what space it can create, when rendered through a magnified lens. Never an end in itself, vulnerability carries with it a fundamental openness to change, an embrace of transformation, with an acceptance that such evolution will be beyond our control. As Jo’s paintings probe this emotional ground unearthed through vulnerability, to fully experience her work requires the same leap of us — to live with uncertainty and permeability, to take the first step of a journey before knowing the final destination. 

Julia Jo’s (b. 1991, Seoul, South Korea; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. MFA Parsons School of Design 2019, BFA Smith College, 2016) practice encompasses a distinctive style of oil painting that incorporates a vibrant color palette to render compositions that shift between the figurative and the abstract. While born in Seoul, Jo spent her childhood and adolescence moving between South Korea and states across the U.S.; and she draws upon a deep, personal well of moments lost in translation, social miscues and interpersonal distance to inspire her practice. Jo has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Charles Moffett, New York, NY, James Fuentes, Los Angeles, CA, and Jessican Silverman, San Francisco, CA. In the fall of 2023, she participated in the esteemed Beecher Residency in Litchfield, CT. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Smith College Museum of Art, ICA Miami, and the High Museum of Art.