JONATHAN FERRARA GALLERY is proud to announce Watercolor + Collage, an exhibition of New York City-based artist Amy Park. For her gallery debut, the artist presents a series of her characteristic, architectural watercolor paintings on paper. Park collages the structural patterning of Modernist façades and metropolitan cityscapes into dense compositions that read more like abstractions. The exhibition will be on view in the main gallery from 1 February to 25 March with First Saturday Gallery Openings on 4 February and 4 March from 6-9pm.
The artist says of her work . . .
The works in Watercolor + Collage explore watercolor paint and collage both as a means of generating ideas and as an end in themselves. I have used both media in various ways for my entire career: they are at the heart of my studio practice.
All the artworks in this exhibition have photographs of buildings as their source, and were painted in watercolor on paper. In them, I am investigating the idea of collage; some of the painted cityscapes were based on actual collages constructed in the studio, while others just look like they were. Dense cityscapes often don’t look real: instead they can look like a complex design project. In these paintings it can be difficult to know which is which. Another phenomenon that these works engage with is that the "all over" patterns of modern building façades are inherently abstract, and when painted, begin to resemble collaged paper.
The paintings in Watercolor + Collage are both abstract and representational at the same time, which is frequently true of my work in general. In all of the work, grids are laboriously constructed through repetitive pencil marks and watercolor strokes, in attempt to create optically charged fields that signify the order, layering, and density of information implicit in urban experience.
Amy Park received her BFA and MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and also studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Ox-Bow Summer Art School. She was a recipient of a Sharpe-Walentas Space Program Award in 2007-2008, and an Artist-In-Residence at the Serenbe Institute in 2012. Her work has been exhibited widely in the US, including Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, NY; Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills; Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York, NY; The Suburban, Milwaukee, WI; Project Row House, Houston, TX; The Poor Farm Experiment, Manawa, WI; and Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Her work is in the permanent collections of Fidelity Investments; New York Presbyterian Hospital; The Cleveland Clinic; Deloitte and Touche USA; Microsoft Corporation; The College of DuPage; Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center; and Drawing Center’s Artist Archive at the Museum of Modern Art. She lives and works in Long Island City, NY with her partner, artist Paul Villinski and their 6-year-old son, Lark.
For further information, press or sales inquiries please contact the gallery director, Matthew Weldon Showman, at matthew@jonathanferraragallery.com or at the gallery +1.504.522.5471.
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