Yoo Youngkuk’s art affords many astonishments: its potent distillation of the natural world into abstracted forms, its inventiveness within self-imposed constraints, its daring and dazzling color. Why has it never been the subject of a solo show beyond his native Korea? Twenty years after the artist’s death at 86, “Colors of Yoo Youngkuk,” a blowout survey of sixty-eight paintings across all three of Kukje Gallery’s buildings, made a vivid case for Yoo as a benchmark abstractionist of the postwar era, in Korea or anywhere.

Born in 1916 in Uljin, on the east coast of Japanese-controlled Korea,