Korean artist Kim Dong Yoo creates amazing portraits of various icons like Audrey Hepburn or Michael Jackson, made up of hundreds of smaller painted portraits that either support or contradict the main subject of the artwork.

Over the years, we’ve featured some truly interesting celebrity portraits on Oddity Central, like Jason Mecier’s pill portraits, or Jason Kronenwald’s chewing gum creations, but we’ve never seen anything like Kim Dong Yoo’s works. This incredibly talented artist painstakingly paints hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of miniature portraits by hand, using them as smaller piece of a much bigger, unbelievably detailed portrait. His portraits look a lot like the stamp paintings of Peter R. Mason, only instead of using recycled stamps to recreate the faces of many historical and Hollywood icons, the Korean painter actually paints every one of the little images that make up the big portraits.

I can’t imagine how long it takes Kim Dong Yoo to complete one of his amazing works of art, but I have to say I admire his patience. It can’t be easy to repeatedly paint almost the same thing over and over again, thousands of times. Although, you have to admit, the end result is just fantastic. How he figures out what to change in every little image to form such a detailed portrait, is beyond me. I understand he sets a grid and uses a photograph as reference, but still…

Kim Dong Yoo unique portrait portraits (I didn’t know what else to call them) are currently on display at the Hasted Kraeuleter Art Gallery, in New York City, where they will stay until March 24. If you’re not in the New York area, check out the video at the bottom to get a perspective of the exhibit at its opening reception.

via My Modern Met