2024 AGWA Foundation Annual Appeal

This year AGWA welcomes a rising star of contemporary art in an Australian-first exhibition.

Born in Daegu, South Korea in 1996, Anna Park is a major new figure in drawing who has swiftly gained recognition for her richly detailed charcoal and ink works on paper that teeter between figuration and expressive abstraction.

Finders Keepers

To celebrate Park’s first solo exhibition in Australia, AGWA is seeking your support to help us bring Park’s captivating Finders Keepers into the State Art Collection. AGWA will be the first Australian institution to acquire Anna Park’s work at a critical moment in her career, and importantly, the acquisition will help to address crucial representation gaps in AGWA’s collection.

Audiences can view Finders Keepers as part of Look, look. Anna Park, exhibiting at AGWA until 8 September.

Related Information

We kindly invite you to support our 2024 Annual Appeal and help keep Finders Keepers at AGWA.

We are truly grateful for gifts of any size to help make this acquisition possible.

DONATE ONLINE TODAY

Or we invite you to make a contribution via one of the following payment methods:

Bank transfer
Name: Commonwealth Bank
Branch: WA Government Banking Centre
BSB: 066-040
Account: 10500006

Please quote FoundAA2024 and your surname on the electronic transfer and kindly provide your details to the AGWA Foundation either by email or phone so that we can acknowledge your donation.

Post
AGWA Foundation
The Art Gallery of Western Australia
PO Box 8363
Perth Business Centre WA 6849

Please make cheques payable to the AGWA Foundation.

Phone
Please contact the AGWA Foundation team on (08) 9492 6685 and we can process your donation over the phone.

Donors who gift $250 and above will be acknowledged on the 2024 Annual Appeal webpage, AGWA Annual Report, 2024 AGWA Foundation Impact Report and the AGWA Foyer LED screen, if desired.

Donors who gift $1000 and above will be recognised in AGWA’s Annual Giving program and enjoy a year-round program of tailored access and events.

Portrait of Anna Park in Look, look. Anna Park at The Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth 2024. © Anna Park, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and BLUM, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo. Photo: Duncan Wright.
Portrait of Anna Park in Look, look. Anna Park at The Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth 2024. © Anna Park, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and BLUM, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo. Photo: Duncan Wright.

 

About the Artist

About the artist Anna Park makes charcoal drawings that teeter between abstraction and figuration, with imagery that homes in on the turbulent and frenzied contemporary experience. Beginning each canvas as an improvisational mark-making dance, Park composes scenes that are gestural snapshots of an over-exposed and self aware human condition—universal moments and interpersonal exchanges she often laces with signifiers of today’s zeitgeist. In black-and-white works that recall the vigorous energy of the graphic novel and the radical fragmentation of Cubism, moments collapse into speed streaks, limbs grasp for one another, and glimpses of familiar faces emerge.

Park is from South Korea but spent her formative years in the American state of Utah—an experience that often positioned her on the outside, looking in. This early lesson in observing from a voyeur’s distance permeates Park’s works today, with an interest and sharp eye for the deep emotive range of the human subject. With visual allegory, recurrent archetypes, and tropes of Americana, Park articulates inner conflict, shame, longing, growth, and mortality within her swirling abstracted tableaus.

Park received her BA from Pratt Institute, New York and her MFA from the New York Academy of Art. Her work was the subject of the solo exhibition Last Call, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah and has been featured in the group exhibitions 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield (2022); 100 Drawings from Now, The Drawing Center, New York (2020); Art on the Grid, Public Art Fund, New York (2020); Drawn Together Again, Flag Art Foundation, New York, NY (2019); among others. She is the First Prize Winner of the AXA Art Prize (2019) and the Grand Prize Winner of Strokes of Genius 11: Finding Beauty (2019). Her work is held in numerous public collections across the country, including the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Pérez Art Museum, Miami.

Thank you

Thank you to the following donors who have helped keep Finders Keepers at AGWA:

On Saturday 27 August, the Gallery is open 10am-3pm only as we prepare for the AGWA Foundation Gala supporting women in the arts. Some exhibition access will be disrupted with two Tracks We Share ground floor galleries closed. AGWA Rooftop bar will be closed, reopening at 2pm Sunday. Details