Secondary Market
KwangHo Shin
South Korean, born 1983
KwangHo Shin (born Seoul, 1983) is a South Korean painter of large expressionist portraits. Faces emerge from slabs of unplanned colour and thick impasto, so that each canvas is as much an emotional self-portrait of the painter as the image of a sitter.
![Untitled [15p10]](https://jvbydwwowjojffkqeqxj.supabase.co/storage/v1/render/image/public/artwork-images/10220/eea479f5-2a1a-4a3d-a2d9-cc0b887e865a.jpg?width=800&height=800&resize=contain&quality=75)
Biography
KwangHo Shin was born in Seoul in 1983 and graduated in fine art from Keimyung University in Daegu in 2009, followed by a residency at the Daegu Art Center in 2011. He lives and works in Seoul.
Faces built from colour
Shin paints faces on a large scale — his canvases often exceed six feet — in thick layers of oil, sometimes combined with charcoal and acrylic. Features are distorted, interrupted or erased by broad slabs of colour, and the portrait holds together through gesture rather than likeness. He has said that his colours are never decided in advance but follow his feelings as he works, and he regards his paintings as autobiographical, a kind of self-portrait.
Untitled, by number
His works carry codes rather than names. A title such as Untitled [15p10] gives the year of the painting, here 2015, and its place in his production, leaving the face itself without an identity.
Exhibitions
After early shows in Daegu, Shin drew international attention in 2013, when his work was featured by Juxtapoz and named “One to Watch” by Saatchi Online’s magazine. That year he exhibited in Seoul and Berlin, followed in 2014 by Cologne and by Creation Under Collapse, his first New York solo exhibition, at UNIX Gallery. He has since had further solo shows with UNIX Gallery in New York, including In Your Face in 2022, and was presented by the gallery at Art15 in London.