Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce Julia Jo: Swoon, the Brooklyn-based painter’s first exhibition with the gallery and in San Francisco, on view September 21 through November 4, 2023. In Jo’s distinctive style of oil painting, bodily forms unite with swarms of bold, curvilinear brush strokes. The oscillation between figuration and abstraction generates a flow between internal feelings and external gestures. Featuring a vibrant palette, her paintings document a rhythmic, and often agitating exploration into the limits of human connection.

Born in Seoul, Jo spent her childhood and adolescence moving between South Korea and various places across the United States. Throughout her peripatetic adolescence, she relied on practiced, performative exchanges of language, personas, and cultural social codes. Today, Jo engages in a form of action painting as a release from the rehearsed gestures of her youth, surrendering to speed and emotion. The canvases display churning strokes and swirls into tidal-like compositions of color and form. Amidst layers of violet, forest green, and crimson, traces of bodies appear. Hints of an extended leg, a stiletto shoe, a pregnant body, or a martini glass leave the viewer wanting more.

INSTALLATION VIEW