Still-Life, Still-City is the fourth city-themed exhibition by the Sehwa Museum of Art. A total of 44 works by 19 domestic and foreign artists the museum has housed are on show at this exhibition. While the previous specially curated exhibitions dealt with the advancement and decline of the city of Seoul and the microscopic world of elements that build the city through the works of new up-and-coming artists active in Korea, this show is designed to extend its scope to a diversity of cities, focusing primarily on the cities of the United States in the 1950s through works by each nation’s artists and look into the social trends and changes that took place in those times and regions.

Commonly thought of as a painting depicting mostly ‘motionless things’ or ‘inanimate objects’, a still life had been a part of portraits or religious paintings in the past, but gradually came to the fore in the 16th century and began to occupy one arena of art entirely. As still lifes, which were nothing more than table paintings, gradually penetrated deeply into our daily lives with the advent of capitalism and popular culture, these paintings represent urban scenes jam-packed with artifacts and commodities. In this context, Still-Life, Still-City is an exhibition that presents new possibilities for contemporary still life painting based on everything in the city and the lives of contemporary people living in the same age.

Diverse approaches to the reproduction of still lifes also mean carving out another genre for artists living in modern cities. Gallery 1 features works by artists active in the discipline of contemporary art such as David Salle, Alex Katz, Robert Longo, and Jonas Wood as well as pieces by representative American pop artists such as Tom Wesselmann, Wayne Thiebaud, and Jim Dine. In this gallery, you can appreciate the works of still life figurative images from the economic revival of America in the 1950s and the abstract expressionism movement. Heading to Gallery 2, the exhibition zooms out from still lifes in the middle to still lifes in the city, but expands to a macroscopic perspective with the appearance of urbanities.

The lives of urban dwellers coexisting among still objects are melted in the works of Yong Rae Kwon who tries to capture rapturous moments of a cityscape as an illusion of light, and of Franz Ackermann that reproduces the scene of travel destinations in painting and video. And lastly, the work of Kibong Rhee has the viewer concentrate on the still life itself as a metaphor that lends something invisible to a lifeless object through the movement of a book floating with the flow of water.

A portrait of contemporary society, a city may become a figure painting, landscape, or a still life in the process of representation. Our city full of motionless still lifes still moves and breathes.