Rosa Park Q&A
Rosa Park is the Korean founder of Francis Gallery, based in Bath and Los Angeles. With an ethos to create welcoming cultural spaces to enjoy art, her galleries offer an antidote to elitism, and as she decamps to London for a new ten-day show, Of Merit, D/A UK asked her to share more

D/A UK: Of Merit is your first show in five years outside of your own galleries in Bath and Los Angeles. Why now?
Rosa Park: Honestly, I think it just felt like it was time. We have a lot of London clients that come to see us here [in Bath] from time to time, but I wanted to make everybody’s life easier and bring our gallery and our artists to London.
D/A UK: The show is on in Marylebone, at a normally private space owned by collector and stylist Elliott Smedley. How did that come about?
RP: Elliot and I met because we hosted the first ever Francis Gallery show in his space; we were introduced through a mutual friend, Lyn Harris, whose shop [Perfumer H] is literally a block away. It’s very intimate and domestic: it’s a retail space that he’s used for years as his private office and studio, but done in such a way that it feels almost like you’re going over someone’s house. I feel really lucky to have our show there.

D/A UK: Tell us about the two artists that you’re showing for Of Merit.
RP: My initial approach was that I wanted to bring a piece of Francis Gallery LA to London – a kind of burst of sunshine at a time of year where it can be very cold and rainy – and that’s why I specifically invited two LA-based painters, Ash Roberts and John Zabawa, to work on this show with me. And then you go a little bit deeper to what the show is actually about: it’s titled Of Merit because we wanted to collectively explore what each artist believes to be of intrinsic value. It was an open invitation for them to interpret that however they wished.
Despite being quite different from one another, there’s going to be a very interesting dialogue between two. John has done a collection of 14 domestic-scale paintings, which are mostly still lives and portraits of people in his life, including a self portrait. Ash’s work is the evolution of a series that she showed with us at the start of the year, which sits between abstraction and figuration. I think most folks perceive her work to be landscapes, but she doesn’t explicitly say: they’re actually a kind of a dreamscape, very nostalgic. She typically works at a very large scale, but I asked if she could go as intimate as possible.
D/A UK: How will these works be presented?
RP: I’m not actually going to hang them side by side, so they each have their own moment. I want it to feel as though, when people walk into this space, it doesn’t feel like you’re entering a classic gallery. It could be domestic, or it could be someone’s private office. It’s an installation style that we’re very familiar with and that we really love at Francis.


The environment is very important to us: the paint colour, even the light socket; every detail. But we do that so that the art is enhanced – as nice as the space may be, it exists to support the art and the artist, not the other way around
D/A UK: What do you look for when you’re representing an artist? Is there a thread that holds everything together?
RP: There’s the intellectualisation of an artist’s practice: what they’re about, and what they’re exploring. But what overrides that for me is a more an instinctual reaction to works and artists when I first meet them or see them at their studio. I wish that I applied more logic to why I decide to work with artists, but it’s really a gut reaction: I can say within a split second, yes or no to an artist when they start talking. And then secondly, as the conversation advances, we’re kind of taking the more pragmatic things into account: are we representing artists across all the mediums that we’re interested in, at different stages of their career, in different parts of the world?
D/A UK: Is seeking out new work a favourite part of the job?
RP: Yeah, that’s my favourite part, to be honest. It’s the discovery, it’s that conversation, it’s the studio visit, and it’s the planting the seed for what will then become a show a year or two later.
I’ve realised this year that I get really excited about working with emerging artists. I think that is our sweet spot. Not to say that I don’t enjoy working with different artists, but emerging artists in particular embody a lot of the spirit and the ethos of the gallery itself. So it’s a natural alignment.



D/A UK: You’ve come from a media/publishing background, rather than a traditional curatorship one. Does that have advantages? And disadvantages?
RP: For the most part, I like to think of it as an advantage. When you really are trying to bring a different point of view to what is arguably a very saturated market, the advantage is that you don’t have any of that baggage. The disadvantage – because there’s always both sides to a coin – is that there are moments when I’m just like, “What is going on? Am I doing this in a way that serves our goals and interests?” For any person that runs a business, they would be lying to themselves to not admit that.
So, I have my good days, I have my bad days. I think the art world is notoriously a very impenetrable slice of the market. I’m a very enthusiastic visitor of many galleries – from blue chip, all the way to my local neighbourhood one – and I think there’s a place for every single one of them. What we’re trying to do is sit somewhere in the middle of those two opposite fields.
D/A UK: What do you wish you’d known when you were starting out, in terms of running a gallery business?
RP: Just how elitist the art world can be. I knew, but I didn’t know how deep it went. That’s been quite a struggle to try and overcome. But as a friend recently pointed out to me, without all the snobbery, I wouldn’t be able to take an opposite stance; I thought that was a brilliant reframe of the situation.

D/A UK: The last time you showed John Zabawa’s work in Bath, he curated a playlist to accompany it. Do you feel that you’re presenting a more experiential approach for visitors, compared to traditional galleries?
RP: Six years ago, when we opened for the first time, I think that kind of stance wasn’t as common. But now, almost every gallery that’s new seems to kind of take that approach, which I love. There has always been an attraction to seeing art in a non-white-cube setting. A lot of people reference Kettle’s Yard [in Cambridge] as a place of immense inspiration, because you get to walk into Jim Ede’s home, look at the art that he collected and curated, and it’s incredible, right?
When I started the gallery, I thought, you can’t separate art from its environment, and that’s something that I really, really believe in. So the environment is very important to us: the paint colour, even the light socket; every detail. But we do that so that the art is enhanced – as nice as the space may be, it exists to support the art and the artist, not the other way around.
One of the first things people say to us when they visit either gallery for the first time is “it feels very lovely here. I could stay here for a while.” Which is a wonderful thing to hear.
D/A UK: Is there anything you collect yourself?
RP: My one true love is books. That’s the first thing that my husband and I started collecting. It’s the one thing that we feel no guilt in buying. I don’t know where that logic comes from!
In terms of art, I’m buying very slowly. One piece or maybe two a year. Sometimes it’s from my own gallery, but oftentimes it’s from other galleries and dealers. A funny thing happened when I started living between Bath and LA; in our Bath flat I just wanted old-master-style paintings, all English, French, Dutch and Flemish artists. In LA, it’s much more eclectic, it kind of spans the globe, it’s in every medium, it’s colourful. It has subconsciously affected me.
Of Merit runs at 99 Crawford Street, London W1H 2HN, from 1-10 November 2024