Lehmann Maupin presents Hot Honey, a series of new works by New York–based artist Anna Park, on view at the gallery’s London location from April 30 through May 30. Featuring Park’s signature large-scale charcoal works, the exhibition centers on female protagonists who both inhabit and unsettle the archetypes of the vixen and the bombshell. Marking Park’s first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom, Hot Honey signals a pivotal moment in the artist’s evolving practice, as technical ambition and cultural critique converge with renewed force.
Drawing from popular media spanning the early twentieth century to the present, Park’s work builds on the premise that gender is constructed through repeated stylization. Born in South Korea and raised in Utah, Park often found herself on the periphery, acutely aware of gendered expectations and social cues. That experience continues to inform her practice. Like Neo Rauch, she navigates the intersection of personal narrative and broader social politics, staging fractured scenes that foreground the performative dimensions of gender. In her more recent series, such as Look, look (2023–2024) and Mirror Shy (2022), her focus narrows to a single female figure, often cropped within comic-strip-like frames. Flattened features and stark compositions recall the cool clarity of Alex Katz, heightening the psychological intensity of each scene.
In Hot Honey, layered compositions expose the instability beneath prescribed roles. Exaggeration and fragmentation reveal the seams of performance, inviting viewers to reconsider how femininity is staged, circulated, and renegotiated in contemporary culture. In earlier works, the figure of the female magician’s assistant served as a symbol of this societal mirage. In the new drawings, that motif is further absorbed into Park’s increasingly complex compositions. They are rendered as props such as bunny ears and top hats detach from their hosts, enabling the female protagonists to assume greater agency and prominence within the pictorial field.
In two towering vertical compositions, intertwined figures and flashes of text surface in cinematic montage. Park draws from film, television, comics, magazines, and the internet, recalling strategies associated with the Pictures Generation while critically reframing their encoded messages. The body appears disjointed and unresolved, resisting singular interpretation. Humor sharpens the work’s edge: figures flash knowing grins that underscore the layers of artifice at play. The bold interplay of image and language calls to mind Barbara Kruger’s graphic immediacy, prompting questions about how meaning accrues around power and desire. Across this body of work, Park also employs shaped supports for the first time, transforming charcoal drawings into sculptural reliefs. Monumental yet intimate, the works balance revelation and concealment.
Hot Honey debuts a new series that further explores duality while introducing restrained passages of color into Park’s charcoal compositions. In Hold That Thought (2026), color functions as emphasis rather than embellishment, intensifying gesture and affect while underscoring the constructed nature of the scene. Two women confront the viewer directly. One meets our gaze through a window cut into the drawing’s surface, partially obscured by sculptural bunny-like ears protruding from the chest of an adjacent figure. The gesture is at once humorous and disquieting, an emblem of commodified sexuality rendered surreal. The shaped support collapses foreground and background, implicating the viewer and exposing the mechanics of spectatorship. From a thought bubble issued by a male figure declaring “Absolutely Mad!” to fragments of partially obscured script embedded within gestural layers, each work unfolds as a vignette that feels both codified and elusive.
The exhibition’s seductive mise en scène operates as a double entendre. Rather than positioning the vixen and bombshell as rivals, Park aligns them in an uneasy alliance, subtly overtaking their male counterparts. The tone is incisive and playful, critical yet knowingly theatrical. Comic characters and female protagonists shifting within and beyond prescribed roles become vessels for the artist’s own reckoning with code-switching.
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