Galerie Bart is pleased to present the latest work of Jisan Ahn (1979, KR) during Amsterdam Art Week 2023. The exhibition Storm is Coming: Part Two is the direct sequel to Jisan Ahn’s solo show at Arario Gallery in Seoul last year. But actually this story begins a year earlier, with the last time Jisan Ahn was on view at Galerie Bart. We then showed his paintings in Everyday: After the Storm, a prophetic exhibition about the world after the corona crisis. Here he wondered what kind of world awaited us after the storm. By now he has his answer: an uncertain and chaotic one, in which all sorts of new doom looms, such as climate problems, the limits of the capitalist system, war and ever increasing inequality. The sky is darkening and the wind is blowing: a new storm will soon be upon us.

As always, Jisan shows oil paintings with a poetic and mysterious character that surreptitiously emerges from the emotion he puts into the depicted figures and metaphorical objects. Next to this subtlety and restraint, the raw power with which he sculpturally and texturally transfers to canvas bare mountain rocks, dark clouds and storm winds, is all the more telling. The influence the seventeenth-century landscape painters had on him, is all too visible in the skies. Jisan’s paintings grab the viewer and invite them to share in his existential angst.