Kira Nam Greene

Biography

Born in Seoul, Korea, Kira Nam Greene lives and works in New York. She received her BFA from San Francisco Art Institute and her MFA from School of Visual Arts.  She had her first solo exhibition in New York in 2010 through A.I.R. Gallery’s Fellowship program. In 2011 she participating in Artists in the Marketplace (AIM) at Bronx Museum of Art.  She has exhibited extensively in New York and San Francisco at Nathan Cummings Foundation, Cheryl McGinnis Gallery,  SOMArts Cultural Center and The Bronx Museum of Art. One of her works was recently acquired by Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln, NE and was recently on view.

Kira Nam Greene's paintings and drawings negotiate the duality and dichotomy of her existence as an Asian immigrant woman in America. As an outsider, Greene is more aware of the contradictions in the plurality of cultures in the present American society. As a feminist, she is repulsed and demoralized by the objectification of female bodies in art history and popular culture, yet she finds herself strongly attracted to sensuality of these images. This paradox has led her to combine the rigidity of patterns with the imagery of desire in the female body. In her most recent work, she replaces the body with the images of lusciously styled food while heightening the complexity with the mixture of patterns and icons derived from various Western and Eastern sources. The food, both in harmony and clash with its surroundings, is the body (literally and metaphorically) and the surrogate for desire to consume and control.