Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking
Website: koak.net
Koak (b. 1981, Michigan; raised in Santa Cruz, CA) lives and works in San Francisco. She received a BFA in Individualized Studies from the California College of the Arts in 2011 and an MFA in Comics from the California College of the Arts in 2016 — among the first MFA programs in comics in the United States. She is represented by Jessica Silverman in San Francisco and Perrotin in Paris, New York, and Hong Kong. Her work is in the permanent collection of the de Young Museum, acquired through the Svane Family Foundation gift. She was awarded a 2020 Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation.
Koak works in painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture, using a graphic, sinuous line rooted in the visual language of comics, Japanese animation, and European illustration to create emotionally charged figurative works. Her paintings and drawings center on female figures depicted with frank, unselfconscious attention — caught in moments of pleasure, tension, vulnerability, and play. Her approach resists both idealization and objectification: the figures have their own psychic weight and inner life. She works in acrylic, gouache, flashe, graphite, chalk, and casein on paper and linen, often dyeing the paper with acrylic ink before working on it. Her sculptural works extend the same vocabulary into three dimensions — bronze limbs, assembled furniture forms — maintaining the intimacy of her drawn line in physical form.
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