Anna Park
Anna Park
November 5 – December 17, 2022Los Angeles
Anna Park
September 1 – October 9, 2021Tokyo
September 22 – October 24, 2020Los Angeles
Broadcasts
Organized by Bill Powers
June 2020
Biography
Anna Park (b. 1996, Daegu, South Korea) makes charcoal drawings that teeter between abstraction and figuration, with imagery that hones in on the turbulent and frenzied contemporary experience. Beginning each canvas as an improvisational mark-making dance, Park composes scenes that are gestural snapshots of an over-exposed and self-aware human condition—universal moments and interpersonal exchanges she often laces with signifiers of today’s zeitgeist. In black and white works that recall the vigorous energy of the graphic novel and the radical fragmentation of Cubism, moments collapse into speed streaks, limbs grasp for one another, and glimpses of familiar faces emerge.
Park is from South Korea but spent her formative years in the US state of Utah—an experience that often positioned her on the outside, looking in. This early lesson in observing from a voyeur’s distance permeates Park’s works today, with an interest and sharp eye for the deep emotive range of the human subject. With visual allegory, recurrent archetypes, and tropes of Americana, Park articulates inner conflict, shame, longing, growth, and mortality within her swirling abstracted tableaus. Park’s first solo exhibition with Blum & Poe premiered in Tokyo in September 2021, and her first solo presentation in Los Angeles will open at the gallery in 2022.
Anna Park lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been featured in the group exhibitions 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT (2022); 100 Drawings from Now, The Drawing Center, New York, NY (2020); Art on the Grid, Public Art Fund, New York, NY (2020); Drawn Together Again, Flag Art Foundation, New York, NY (2019); among others. She received her BA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY and her MFA from New York Academy of Art, New York, NY. She is the First Prize Winner of the AXA Art Prize (2019) and the Grand Prize Winner of Strokes of Genius 11: Finding Beauty (2019).