Anna Park

Broadcasts

Broadcasts: Sympathetic Magic

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 homes 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. 

Anna Park lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions internationally, including Look, look. Anna Park, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, WA (2024) and Last Call, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2022). Recent group exhibitions include 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT (2022); Fire Figure Fantasy: Selections from ICA Miami’s Collection, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL (2022); Artists Inspired By Music: Interscope Reimagined, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2022); 100 Drawings from Now, The Drawing Center, New York, NY (2020); 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). Her work is represented in the public collections of the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Australia; BY ART MATTERS, Hangzhou, China; Fortress House, Gibraltar; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL. 

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