Stella Im Hultberg was born in South Korea, raised in Seoul, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and later in California and now she lives and works in Portland, OR with her daughter and husband.
Academically, she studied Industrial Design and worked as a product designer before serendipitously falling into the art world in late 2005.
According to thinkspacegallery, Setella Im Hultberg was known as a self-taught painter and she has also worked in sculpture, creating objects based on motifs explored in her two-dimensional works. Hultberg’s mixed-media practice includes drawings and paintings in ink, watercolor, and oils on paper, wood, and canvas. Playing with varying qualities of opacity and translucency, in her application and interaction of these mediums, she creates works that vary in tone from dreamy and ethereal to bold and delineated.
“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”, The thinkspacegallery said.
One of her latest artworks, Hollow Resonance (Project Room), was exhibited from Saturday, November 12, 2016-December 3, 2016, with the reception of the artist.