GaHee Park's paintings look like still lifes until something in them looks back. Soft Shell, the artist's first solo exhibition in the large space at Jessica Silverman in San Francisco, gathers thirteen new oil paintings in which the containers of everyday life, conches, fruit skins, fingernails and fish scales, offer shelter that never quite protects. The show opened on 28 October and runs to 19 December.

Park takes the exhibition's title from her own description of the soft structures we live inside to feel safe. Curtains and clothing conceal and reveal in equal measure. Martini glasses and aquariums turn their subjects into creatures in a fishbowl, at once aloof and exposed. The women who populate these chimerical worlds are neither demure nor passive: bare-breasted and hyper-aware, they return the viewer's gaze and turn looking into a contest.

The largest canvas, Eating Angel, is the show's dark joke. A monumental nude woman towers over a cat beside a wing licked clean, a small white shirt and a discarded halo, the animal, it seems, having eaten the angel and its innocence along with it. A toe at one edge and a gloved hand at the other suggest onlookers who have stumbled into the scene. Elsewhere a dead goose lies on a platter in Dream of a Bird, its head resting on an open book, while Bouquet with a Visitor lets a finger creep from behind a curtain and conjoined fish gasp for air.

Park, born in Seoul in 1985, studied in Philadelphia and New York and now lives in Montreal. Her work draws on feminist artists including Lisa Yuskavage and Nicole Eisenman, and its dreamlike, theatrical spaces recall Rene Magritte and Gertrude Abercrombie. A large glass mosaic commission for John F. Kennedy Airport's Terminal 6 debuts this month, and her first institutional solo show in the United States, Behind the Curtain, is on view at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco through 3 January 2027.