BECKY MOON

Sticks and Stones

April 4-June 21, 2025

Bruno David is pleased to present Sticks and Stones, an exhibition by Korea-born artist Becky Moon. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. In conjunction with the exhibition, Bruno David Gallery will publish a catalogue of the artist’s work.

Sticks and Stones is a series of paintings that explore the themes of belief, tangibility, mass, and gravity. Moon believes there is nothing as everlasting as the invisible human mind. The mind is a refuge for those who long for a land they can never return to. Moon wants her paintings to be flag posts that remind the existence of the mind that it is real, alive, and persistent. Even when all is lost, the mind lives on.

Moon comes from a half-North Korean and half-South Korean heritage. Growing up, she heard lively accounts from my grandparents about leaving everything North behind to escape war and violence. Their emigration made her question what remains, when everything physical perishes. She realized that the immaterial mind, preserved through love and blood, cannot be taken away. Consequently, she became immersed in depicting the existence of minds.

Therefore, Moon has been depicting the structure of the mind through arrangements of ordinary objects such as branches, stones, and snail shells. She builds the objects out of hundreds of small, squiggly brushstrokes made with meticulous dedication. Meticulousness is crucial because it slowly builds a fortress of reverence for everything the artist chooses to depict. The structures created by those objects celebrate their complexity and tenacity. In her stacked wood paintings like Going… going… gone!, a thin line of gravity holds the hundreds of tree branches together. Their balance shows the role of gravity, a force with qualities similar to belief. One small belief can hold numerous thoughts together.

Moon graduated with a BFA in art with a second major in philosophy from Washington University in St. Louis in 2024. She attended Yale Norfolk school of Art in 2023. Her most recent solo exhibition was at Harvard University with the support of the Mahindra Humanities Center. In addition, she has exhibited in group shows at The Luminary, New York Academy of Art. She currently works as an artist and educator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Museum.