Going on view Sunday, June 2, 2019 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, “David Park: A Retrospective†is the first major museum exhibition in more than 30 years to present the powerfully expressive work of David Park (1911-1960), best known as the originator of Bay Area Figurative art.
In the immediate postwar years, Park, like most avant-garde American artists of his day, engaged with Abstract Expressionism and painted non-objectively. In a moment of passion in late 1949 or early 1950, he made the radical decision to abandon nearly all of his abstract canvases at an East Bay dump and return to the human figure, marking the beginning of the Bay Area Figurative movement.
This show, which are displayed chronologically, features 114 works traces the full arc of the artist’s career, from his early social realist efforts of the 1930s to his mature figurative paintings of the 1950s and his astounding final works on paper.
Park lived for most of his adult life in San Francisco and Berkeley. He was a beloved teacher at both the California School of the Fine Arts and the University of California, Berkeley, and he was at the center of a vibrant community of Bay Area artists.
The powerful paintings he made in the decade that followed his dramatic departure from abstraction brought together his long-held interest in classic subjects such as portraiture, domestic interiors, musicians, rowers and bathers with lush, gestural paint handling and an extraordinary sense of color.
Between 1958 and 1959, Park reached his expressive peak, reveling in the sensuous qualities of paint to create intensely physical, psychologically charged and deeply felt canvases. When this fertile period was cut short by illness in 1960 and he could no longer work on canvas, Park transferred his creative energy to other media. In the last months of his life, bed-ridden, he produced a remarkable 30-foot-long felt-tip pen scroll and a poignant series of gouaches.
For more on this exhibition, see: www.themodern.org or call Kendal Smith Lake at 817.840.2167.
