Chris Oh began making art as a child in Portland, Oregon, copying pictures from encyclopedias and taking inspiration from the plants and rocks his parents brought home from hikes. After graduating from New York’s School of Visual Arts in 2004, he took an interest in photorealistic painting and portraiture before beginning to reproduce creased and cracked vintage sci-fi and fantasy book covers on canvas. In 2015, paying homage to the Renaissance apprentice tradition, he re-created a da Vinci print on an IKEA dish towel. Since then, he has painstakingly transferred details from the work of the old masters onto surfaces including plastic bags, bubble wrap, sneakers, seashells, crystals, and eggs. The paintings in Passages re-create, on the marbled inner covers of antique books, seven scenes by the sixteenth-century artist Pieter Brueghel the Elder and his son, Pieter Brueghel the Younger. Five are drawn from the surviving works of Brueghel the Elder’s 1565 “months of the year” cycle, The Hunters in the SnowThe Gloomy DayHaymakingThe Harvesters, and The Return of the Herd—each a portrait of labor or leisure amid the landscapes of winter, early spring, early summer, late summer, and autumn. In lieu of a lost sixth painting depicting the sowing of late spring, Oh referred to Brueghel the Younger’s Spring (ca. 1633), an oil-on-panel work based on an ink drawing by his father. The seventh painting in Passages returns us to the winter valley of The Hunters in the Snow with a re-creation of the Elder’s The Census at Bethlehem (1566). After constructing preliminary designs in Photoshop, Oh painted each scene at his desk, with the help of a magnifying glass.

—AG

 


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