AXA Art Prize-winning artist Anna Park is known for her scenes of unrestrained contemporary American life depicted in large-scale charcoal drawings.
Read MoreBorn in Daegu, South Korea, Park moved often in her childhood. Living at different times in South Korea, New Zealand, California, and Utah, Park possesses an outsider perspective that informs the voyeuristic qualities of her work.
Park spent her formative years in Utah where, from around the age of 10, she came under the informal tutelage of Bruce Robertson, art teacher and director of the Visual Art Institute in Salt Lake City. At after-school classes at the institute, Park developed a love for figure drawing and painting.
In 2015, Park embarked on a Fine Arts Major at the Pratt Institute in New York before studying at the New York Academy of Art, where she completed a CFA in 2018 and an MFA in 2020. During her time at the New York Academy, Park found inspiration looking through old catalogues of British painter Cecily Brown, an influence that comes across in the cramped composition and Francis Bacon-esque figures of her drawings.
Anna Park's large-scale black-and-white drawings in charcoal on paper and panel find a balance between abstraction and figuration. Boisterous parties and other crowded scenes of interaction, interlaced with tropes of Americana, are consumed by a flurry of drawn gestures and marks.
Starting with works like Petty Games (2018), Park began to depict crowded party scenes in which figures with faces distorted by the artist's gestural marks seem to let loose of inhibitions. The artist captures a broad range of individuals and groups engaging in flirtation, laughter, drunken antics, and occasionally butting heads.
A self-described people watcher, Park expressed her interest in social dynamics in an interview with Bill Powers for Blum & Poe. Rather than any personal experience, Park credits the composition of these scenes to stock imagery of people dancing, cheesy pictures, and memes found online, which she has collected over time.
Park often articulates themes of tension and release in scenes that seem to capture a brief moment of raw unhinged human interaction. In her 2019 'Tennis' series, Park presents imagery of violent clashes between tennis players losing all restraint in fits of rage. Frantic brush marks result in abstracted features, farcically transforming the sporting figures into grotesque muscular beasts.
In Life (2019), Park's abstraction enhances the sense of rage emanating from the figures upset by the board game they were playing. Gleeful and animalistic expressions of pleasure in Parent Teacher Conference (2019) present a moment of seemingly unhinged debauchery.
Developing her gestural language further in works such as Handle With Care (2019) and Mixed Signals (2020), Park's subjects all but melt away into swirling abstract marks and forms. In Mixed Signals, a recognisable form emerges here and there from the sea of gestural marks: facial features, parts of limbs, striped drinking straws, desserts, and letters, among others.
Fragments of imagery can also be deciphered to unveil objects and imagery emblematic of contemporary American life. This is most evident in This Is America (2020), which features an American flag, designer sunglasses, and a striped straw, among other things.
Some works like the humorous First Marriage (2021) remain more overtly figurative in style.
In 2020, Park participated in the New York Public Art Fund's Art on the Grid project, which presented 50 artists' work on bus shelters and digital screens across the city. Park's contribution, Goose, employs the artist's expressive visual language to convey the energy and vitality of New York City.
Anna Park has been the subject of both solo exhibition and group exhibitions internationally.
Solo exhibitions include Hello, Stranger, Blum & Poe, Tokyo (2021); On Tilt, T293, Rome (2020); and Honeymoon, Ross+Kramer Gallery, East Hampton (2019).
Group exhibitions include Convergent Evolutions: The Conscious of Body Work, Pace Gallery, New York (2021); 100 Drawings from Now, The Drawing Center, New York (2020); Universes 2, The Garage, Amsterdam (2019); and Drawn Together Again, Flag Art Foundation, New York (2019).
Park's website can be found here, and her Instagram can be found here.
Michael Irwin | Ocula | 2021
Currently there are no artworks available from our member galleries, however Ocula Advisory may have a number works which they can potentially offer for private sale.
Please contact Ocula Advisory for more information.
Contact
