David Park: A Retrospective – SFMOMA

David Park, “Four Men”, 1958; Whitney Museum of American Art, purchase, with funds from an anonymous donor;
© Estate of David Park; courtesy Natalie Park Schutz, Helen Park Bigelow, and Hackett Mill, San Francisco.

David Park: A Retrospective – SFMOMA ‘David Park: A Retrospective’ is the first major exhibition of Park’s work in three decades and the first to examine the full arc of his extraordinary career. SFMOMA, April 11 – September 7, 2020.]]>

Source: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)

At the age of 38, in late 1949 or early 1950, artist David Park (1911–1960) filled his Ford with as many of his Abstract Expressionist canvases it could fit and abandoned them at the city dump. The work he made next shocked the Bay Area art world. At a moment when serious American painting was dominated by abstraction, Park emphatically reintroduced the figure into his practice and began painting “pictures,” as he called them—a radical decision that led to the development of the Bay Area Figurative Art movement.

The powerful paintings Park created in the decade that followed his dramatic trip to the dump and departure from abstraction reveal a fresh approach to his long-term interests in vernacular and classic subjects — portraiture, domestic interiors, musicians, rowers and bathers.

Featuring approximately 127 works displayed chronologically and ranging from the artist’s early social realist paintings from the 1930s to his final works on paper from 1960, David Park: A Retrospective is organized by SFMOMA and curated by Janet Bishop, Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator and Curator of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA. The first galleries of the exhibition reveal a restless artist, in the first decades of his career, deftly moving from style to style in search of a distinctive voice that culminate in a rare group of surviving abstractions from the late 1940s. At the heart of the presentation is a rich selection of the 1950s Bay Area Figurative canvases for which Park is best known.

Related content

snap+share: transmitting photographs from mail art to social networks – SFMOMA (exhibition, 2020)