Anna Park 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 American 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 received her BA from Pratt Institute, New York and her MFA from the New York Academy of Art. Her work was the subject of the solo exhibition Last Call, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah and has been featured in the group exhibitions 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield (2022); 100 Drawings from Now, The Drawing Center, New York (2020); Art on the Grid, Public Art Fund, New York (2020); Drawn Together Again, Flag Art Foundation, New York, NY (2019); among others. 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 held in numerous public collections across the country, including the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Pérez Art Museum, Miami.
