CATHERINE OPIE, ANNA PARK

In Dialogue: Catherine Opie & Anna Park considers two significant approaches to contemporary portraiture, through photography and charcoal and ink on paper, respectively. Throughout art history, portraits have been used to memorialize, admire, and convey individual narratives; the genre is by nature intimate and mandates a humanistic encounter with the subject matter. Formally, portraiture is often harnessed to mark moments of transition in a subject’s life. This iteration of In Dialogue looks at Opie and Park’s approach to the portrayal of others, and themselves, through a visual language that is distinctly their own.

Opie is known for her powerfully dynamic photography that examines the ideals and norms surrounding the culturally constructed American dream and American identity. In Opie’s signature series, Portraits (1993–1997), the artist employs a traditional approach to portraiture—by staying in deep conversation with the formal qualities and approach to Baroque painting—to depict friends from the queer community in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Opie’s subjects give a strong voice to those historically less centered in portrait photography, providing representation to her friends and the community at large. Using dramatic staging, Opie presents queer and trans bodies in intimate photographs, which compositionally are images of immense power and respect. In her portraits, Opie establishes a level of ambiguity of both identity and place by exaggerating masculine, feminine, or non-normative gender characteristics, while honoring these identities. Additionally, In Dialogue: Catherine Opie & Anna Park comes on the heels of Opie’s first solo exhibition in Brazil, which is on view at The Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) through the end of October.

While Opie’s portraits foreground her community and friends, Anna Park’s depiction of the figure in her work serves as a vehicle for understanding her own experience of the American dream and American culture. Park’s large-scale, satirical self-portraits comment on the cultural construction and perception of identity, sexuality, and power in an increasingly media saturated world. Beginning each drawing as an improvisational mark-making dance, Park composes scenes that are snapshots of an over-exposed and self-aware human condition—universal moments and interpersonal exchanges she often laces with signifiers of today’s zeitgeist, while also showing a deep emotive range of the human subject. In black-and-white works that hover between figuration and abstraction, Park’s compositions recall the vigorous energy of the graphic novel and the radical fragmentation of Cubism or even Pop Art; moments collapse into speed streaks, limbs grasp for one another, and glimpses of familiar faces emerge.

Here, Park’s new works are informed by the current moment, in which a younger and “chronically online” generation is reaching back to and glorifying traditional values and gender roles. Park was born in Korea, but spent formative adolescent years in Utah; she has noted similarities between Korean and Mormon values around family and a woman’s role, which she noticed overlap with the recent internet phenomenon of the “tradwife.” “Tradwives,” among other similar online depictions of women, are focused on the portrayal of heteronormative marriage, family rearing, homemaking, and demure femininity. Park has often said that her work functions as a way to unpack and understand her subconscious. In the works on view, Park grapples with and ultimately resolves a flawed version of the American dream.

Following her recent exhibition, Look, Look, at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Park continues to play with the dimensionality of drawing. Text boxes in relief, or “excavations,” appear as thought bubbles akin to the interjections that occur when dreaming. As is typical of Park’s work, inspiration is culled from a wide range of popular media, including social media trends, the 1960s sitcom Bewitched, and the 1960s cult classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, which follows three sadistic go-go dancers on a revenge spree. Concurrent with this exhibition, Park’s work is included in _Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture _at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) through February 18, 2025.

In this exhibition, Opie and Park prompt us to question the nature of subjectivity in portraiture by challenging societal norms and expectations around gender and sexuality. In Dialogue: Catherine Opie & Anna Park harnesses the power of portraiture to exceed traditional notions of the genre.

**Media Inquiries **Julie Niemi, Associate Director of Public Relations julie@lehmannmaupin.com

McKenna Quatro Johnson, Communications & Research Associate mckenna@lehmannmaupin.com