Stella Im Hultberg

Stella Im Hultberg is a Korean born, New York based artist. Her work is self-described as being driven by intuition and process. The impression of spontaneity and resolve when faced with her work speaks to this willingness to allow it to define its own end results. The artist produces across media, experimenting with materials and applications, and allows the work to evolve organically through its execution. At the heart of her practice is the exploration of identity, and an interest in shifting possibilities for the self and other. Her paintings of ethereal women subtly excavate the possibility of multiplicities in a single self. By combining detailed figurative rendering with surreal imagery, Im Hultberg probes the porous boundaries between self and other. The figures in her work appear in various guises, and she mobilizes them as vehicles for affect and suggestion. At times they are mirrored, multiplied, fractured; they emerge as haunting spectral entities without definitively binding selves. In this respect the figurative in her work seems a symbolic trope for the impermanence and inconstancy of our unremittingly changing lives and relationships. These beautifully executed images are populated with figures who seem unspecific a...

Industrial Design, California State University, Long Beach.