Leegan Koo-Almost Blue

Leegan Koo-Almost Blue
May 2nd-31st, 2020
Opening Reception Saturday, May 2nd, 2020 8-11p

La Luz de Jesus Gallery is pleased to present Almost Blue, a solo exhibition by Leegan Koo on view from April 10 – May 3, 2020.

Through his heightened sensitivity to mood, atmosphere, and emotion, Leegan Koo transforms his own memories of the Real into ambiguous and darkly surrealistic narratives of the grimly Sublime. Koo’s past experiences and places traveled manifest pictorially as a pastiche of feelings – and it is this emotional mapping that inspires the deeply complex and dissociative energy of his works. The characters Koo depicts are mysterious, placeless, wandering composites. He says of his work that the “persons inside [his] paintings are on their journey to connect with their true selves and to find contentment. They have been placed in different times and places.… The places might look gloomy, grotesque, or even creepy, but their experiences are free from what viewers might judge and interpret. [He likes] to give [his] characters, so to speak, total freedom to experience infinite possibilities of reality and to explore their different selves that might have been born out of different realities.”

Leegan Koo began painting at a young age. He grew up moving from one metropolitan city to the next – Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City – and it is this constant moving that inspires Koo’s interest in cultural diversity and tension. In 2011, he began to focus on cityscapes and gradually integrated the surreal with the city. In 2013, Koo attended the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, and shortly thereafter, moved to Los Angeles where he lives and works now. Leegan Koo has shown with Nucleus Gallery in Portland, Arcadia Contemporary in Pasadena, and Copro Gallery in Santa Monica. This will be Leegan’s inaugural exhibition with La Luz de Jesus Gallery.