A Smaller Death — Solo show at Ascaso Gallery Miami.

Exhibition text By Vittoria Benzine:
Leo Park’s paintings are a trap. You look, you get it. Or so you think. The Stockholm-based artist has distilled the body’s forms, then remixed them in his own version of Neo-Expressionism.

Art writers habitually extoll how certain paintings ‘reward a closer read.’ Alas, the trope fits here, too. Let Park’s paintings permeate you, and they will pay dividends, in easter egg after art historical easter egg, from Ben Day dot sand to Phillip Guston eyes. Since earning his MFA from Sweden’s Konstfack University of Arts, Craft and Design, Park has embraced a lineage leading from George Condo to Henry Moore and Pablo Picasso. Park’s latest works, on view throughout “A Smaller Death”, his first show with Ascaso Gallery, present his most individual synthesis yet.

Technically, the artist started out as a small town Swedish teenager with a penchant for comics and graffiti. That pairing became his introduction into modernism’s rich contrast and bold imagery. Park went on to draw from the dense symbologies and compositional nonhierarchy of artists like Paul Klee, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cy Twombly, and Öyvind Fahlström. Since 2019, he has also advanced the art historical tradition of the nude as a narrative site by flattening figures into canvases for tattoos inspired by graffiti, of course, in addition to rune stones, petroglyphs, Hebrew letters, and more—some acquired from self-directed studies, others invented, like sigils.

Yes, Park’s engrossed in his formalist “plastic problems”. But, he’s not too high and mighty for pleasure. These past five years, he’s pinpointed various intimate themes, piecing together evocative scenes with just a few parts. Soon enough, this fresh series revealed, very palpably, Park’s most layered paintings thus far. They resume his bather motif, with much deeper blue skies than previously, skin growing ruddy beneath. Enhanced narratives abound. The overwhelmed Casanova in Park’s looming Large Tattooed Bather (all works 2026) connects with viewers via one especially Guston-esque eye, clutching on for dear life to what seems to be a pair of legs, while surf crashes in the distance.

Park has further immersed himself in the tradition of modernism by conjuring a rockstar mythology to substantiate his sensual artworks. For starters, he’s created the most recent album cover for the punk rock band Viagra Boys. He also dons the same pendant for every photo he appears in. Park told me that personal experiences from his challenging year of the Snake lurk amidst this show, throughout his largest array of big paintings to date. No matter how much he wants to tell these tales, though, they remain shrouded by a veil of abstraction, leaving room for projection. Bodies are surfaces here, after all. Nevertheless Ikaros Falling in the Sea Behind a Tattooed Woman can’t help but tell a story, right? The work’s doomed namesake manifests as a simple splash, a clear allusion to Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 16th century take on the myth—as well as an ode to recently deceased Pop artist David Hockney’s glamorous pool painting, A Bigger Splash (1967). That reference evokes Park’s title, “A Smaller Death”, itself a riff on the French term for a moment of intense release. The titular work, meanwhile, initially presents a figure framed by limbs. A moment later, her head emerges, lolling luxuriously in a corner, her lips forming a perfect “O.”