PAST EXHIBITION
David Park: Works on Paper
May 8, 2008—June 28, 2008

Press Release

Hackett-Freedman Gallery presents a group of important, rarely exhibited works on paper by David Park (1911–1960), May 8–June 28, 2008. An opening reception will take place on Thursday, May 8, from 5:30 to 7:30pm. A full-color catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

Park reasserted the primacy of the figure within abstraction in the 1950s, ushering in a return to figuration that continues to impact American art today. This exhibition features a wide-ranging selection of Park’s paintings and drawings on paper, ranging from rare, early drawings from the 1930s to his celebrated late gouaches, completed shortly before his death in 1960. Also included are figurative drawings that were executed during the now-legendary 1950s group drawing sessions that included Park’s peers Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, Paul Wonner, and Theophilus Brown. Several ink on paper works from the collection of the late Mary Keesling, a well-known San Francisco art patron and a major advocate for postwar California art, are on exhibit as well.

Park’s works on paper share many of the same formal and emotive concerns that are present in his oil paintings: unconventional spatial relationships, a flattened picture plane, intense color, and a bold, graphic line. The marks are controlled yet assured; to many, the vigorous expressionism in the paintings on paper best conveys Park’s singular achievements as an artist. Like his oil paintings, these works express a profound respect for the human condition without sentimentality. This last trait is most clearly seen in the gouaches that Park painted in 1960, the year he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. That summer, despite intense pain, he managed to paint over 100 small gouaches in the ten weeks prior to his death. These vividly colored and spontaneous, yet poignant, works are a moving testimony to Park’s supremacy as a painter.

Born in Boston in 1911, Park moved to San Francisco and began teaching at the California Institute of Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). In 1949, Park destroyed the majority of his abstract works in an effort to engage with more meaningful subject matter. He began working on what are now called his “New Figurative” paintings, which are essentially abstractions with unmistakably figurative elements. Thus, he introduced the style that would later be known as Bay Area Figurative Painting, a term coined by curator Paul Mills in his 1957 Oakland Museum exhibition of the same name. Fellow artists and teachers Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn soon followed Park’s heraldic shift. Their works influenced scores of others and begat a distinctive west coast style of expression. Today Park’s works are highly sought after by curators and collectors and have recently commanded record-setting prices at auction.

David Park’s paintings are featured in major museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Oakland Museum of California.

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