David Park: A Retrospective
On view through September 8, 2019
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
Fort Worth, Texas
www.themodern.org
Organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and curated by Janet Bishop, Thomas Weisel Family Curator of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA, this 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. “David Park: A Retrospective” 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.
Image: David Park, Two Bathers, 1958
