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Gladstone Gallery showcases American Maureen Gallace in last exhibit before Hannam-dong move

Published: 09 Apr. 2026, 17:20 Updated: 15 Apr. 2026, 09:55

LIM JEONG-WON
[email protected]

Paintings by artist Maureen Gallace are seen displayed at the Gladstone Gallery in Seoul. [GLADSTONE GALLERY]

Gladstone Gallery Seoul’s last exhibition in its current Cheongdam location opened Thursday, showcasing the work of American painter Maureen Gallace.

After the exhibition, titled simply with the painter’s name, Gladstone Gallery will move to a new location in Hannam-dong, Yongsan in central Seoul after the summer.

The “Maureen Gallace” exhibition presents a collection of oil and acrylic paintings by Gallace, widely recognized for her abstract yet intimate portrayals of coastal and rural environments in the American Northeast.

Gallace’s paintings, all on a small scale and rendered with a wet-on-wet technique — a method where wet paint is applied onto a surface that is not yet dry with the previous layer of paint, creating soft and blended images — depict houses, shorelines and flowers that threads the line between figuration and abstraction.

“Maureen starts with a photograph [as a reference for her paintings], but the photograph is not a destination for the painting,” explained Paula Tsai, curator and partner of Gladstone Gallery, on Thursday. “She looks at the image, and she works a very long time in trying to break it down to the essentials. And what happens is that once you break it down to the essentials, it gives you a lot of room to do very painterly things like color form surface and contrast.”

″Woods Hole″ (2026) by painter Maureen Gallace is seen in this photo provided by the Gladstone Gallery. [GLADSTONE GALLERY]

“Because [Gallace] has this formula of these seascapes, landscapes and flowers and she purposely removes any sort of like personal associations with the with people, [it’s like] there is no meaning until somebody's looking at it — it's an empty vessel,” Tsai said.

The goal that Gallace is reaching through the deliberate choices of weaving figuration and abstraction, the wet-on-wet technique and excluding specificity from her subjects is to “get to the essence” and is “a method of reduction” that allows the viewer to interpret the work individually, according to Tsai.

Gallace, who currently lives and works in New York, was born in 1960 in Stamford, Connecticut. Her work has been shown at solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Dallas Museum of Art.

The “Marueen Gallace” exhibition runs through May 16 at the Gladstone Gallery in Cheongdam-dong, Gangnam District, southern Seoul.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]