AMY PARK

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.