Jessica Silverman Gallery

SF Art Galleries - Openings & Events Event source calendar Event Link: see venue calendar above ^^ October 28–December 19, 2026 Opening Reception: Wednesday, October 28, 5-7pm Preview "Soft Shell" Request PDF Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce GaHee Park’s first solo show in the gallery's large space, running October 28–December 19, 2026. Born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, Park completed degrees in Philadelphia and New York before moving to her current home base in Montreal, Canada. Her neo-surrealist paintings complicate the boundaries between interior and exterior, fantasy and reality, viewer and viewed. Featuring 13 new oil paintings, the exhibition showcases her signature figures and still lifes that often mutate into landscapes. The exhibition takes its title, “Soft Shell,” from what Park describes as “the containers of life that we inhabit to feel safe, but which do not protect us completely.” Throughout the show, protection takes many physical forms, such as conches, fruit skins, fingernails, and fish scales. Curtains and clothing conceal and reveal, while martini glasses and aquariums evoke life in a fishbowl. All objects are at once aloof and exposed—a condition embodied by the enigmatic women who populate Park’s chimerical worlds. These soft structures offer shelter while simultaneously exposing the vulnerability of the bodies and identities they contain. Park is a mistress of ambiguity. In the still life, Fish Bowl with Fruits (2026), a single open eye peers through a peephole—or is, perhaps, reflected in a mirror. At the center of the composition, phallic fish and celestial orbs are reflected and refracted within a kaleidoscopic glass bowl. Brimming with color and pattern, Park’s use of geometric fragmentation and flat surface recalls the work of Georges Braque and Sonia Delaunay. Paintings such as Faces with Frog and Tadpoles and Woman and Moth in Eclipse (both 2026) feel vintage yet contemporary. They suggest dusk or dawn in indefinite locations that could be inside or outside, natural or artificial, airy or airless. Like those of René Magritte and Gertrude Abercrombie, Park’s settings are eerily quiet, theatrical spaces that follow the logic of dreams, in which appearances give way to psychological truths. Park loves to play with the Western tradition of the female nude, which Surrealists revisited in the early twentieth century. In these works, women were intended to entertain the European male gaze. Park changes the rules of this old colonial game. Her bare breasted figures are neither demure nor passive but hyper aware. Refusing to be conquered, these heroines are sly exhibitionists who draw the viewer into a “ping pong” of gazes. The show’s largest work, Eating Angel (2026) is rife with dark humor. A monumental nude woman looms above a cat beside a wing licked clean, a small white shirt, and a cast-off halo. It appears the cat has devoured the angel of the title, along with its innocence. The figure holds a white drape as though to shield this scene from view; however, a toe on the left and a gloved hand on the right implies the presence of voyeurs who’ve become unwitting witnesses to this divine crime. Park also displays a macabre sense of humor in Dream of a Bird (2026). Here, a drawn-back curtain sets the stage, revealing a dead goose on a platter with fruit. The bird’s head rests directly on the pages of an open book which depicts a bifurcated cloudscape. Has the creature snapped its neck by flying into an image of the sky? Like many people in America today, did it confuse representation with reality? In Bouquet with a Visitor (2026), an abundant floral arrangement overflows with spread leaves and erect anthurium spadices. Set against a grey backdrop, the vase is surrounded by unexpected intrusions: a finger creeps out from beneath a curtain, conjoined fish gasp for air, a halved pear balances on its end, and a reflective silver platter of fruit partially conceals an open eye. What might initia…