SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Toomey Tourell is presenting a solo exhibition of new work by the artist Maria Park entitled, “Composition”.

Composition, is inspired by Francois Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966), a film based on Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel on the effects of mass media on literature. Truffaut’s first film in color as well as in English, Fahrenheit 451 has been described by critics as “display(ing) the artisan more than the artist.” Park found that the strangeness of the film produced possibilities for the viewer to gain a heightened awareness of the medium of film itself, creating lingering moments of abstraction where image is suspended from content. This exploration is being exhibited at Toomey Tourell Fine in four parts:

Still 1-9 are based on the opening sequences of the film which shows a bag containing the books found in a searched apartment slowly falling four flights off a balcony. These works are reverse painted with acrylic on transparent sheets of Polycarbonate, each 8“X10”.

Composition 1-12 are close -ups of the bag of books, in varying states of abstraction. These are reverse painted with acrylic on transparent sheets of Plexiglas, each 36” x 30”.

Cover 1-12 are images of Penguin Book covers published between 1938 and 1964, excluding any text. These are reverse painted with acrylic on transparent sheets of glass, each 8” x 10”. (Cover 4 is on Plexiglas.)

Bookends, Set 1 and 2, each include painted cubes and books on shelves. Depicting scenes from the film wrapped around two adjacent sides, these 7” colored Plexiglas cubes are painted in acrylic and arranged on the shelves as bookends.

Born in Munich, Germany, Maria Park received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is currently Associate Professor at Cornell University in the Department of Art, College of Architecture, Art, and Planning

Using a variety of media and techniques, Park’s body of work creates fantastical landscapes that reflect influences spanning comic books, computer graphics and traditional painting. Park uses imagery from the internet, personal photographs, television and film to create surfaces that are surreal, crisp and timeless. Paint is meticulously layered and stenciled to produce an interplay of edges, details and gestures executed in reverse on sheets of polycarbonate and acrylite, breaking apart the images into a multiplicity of possible areas of focus. In this new body of work, this use of “flatness” speaks to our cultural relationship to the screen.

Park has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the 2002 Korea Arts Foundation of America Award, a 2003 MFA Grant Award from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the 2008 Watts Prize for Faculty Excellence at Cornell University. Her exhibitions included the Korean Cultural Center, Sotheby’s Amsterdam, Margaret Thatcher Projects, Seoul National University Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea and Genia Schreiber University Art Gallery, Tel-Aviv, Israel (to name a few). In 2014, Park will be included in Beyond Earth Art at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art in Ithaca NY, curated by Andrea Inselmann. More information and a complete C.V. is available through the gallery. This marks Maria Park’s 5th solo show with Toomey Tourell Fine Arts.