DALE FRANK

Born 1959 in New South Wales, Australia. Lives and works in the Hunter Valley, Australia.

Dale Frank, The River, Dettol colour, with depth increasing Molasses consistency, the acid sting giving way to a sweet nauseous caramel detachment. His eyes no longer inward squirting lemons but swollen ripe wet fruit. Peeled back Lychees the size of Grapefruit. The Panadol induced creation of a dead man by circumstance and the fancy of delusions, "floating islands", a primordial soup that was his bilious beginning and bloated undoing. A loud pungent dessert ever present with each bite of each preceding course of his fifty year banquet., 2009, varnish on linen, 300 x 260 cm. Courtesy of Anna Schwartz Gallery

Dale Frank is one of the best-known current Australian painters. At 16 years of age, he was awarded the Red Cross Art Award. By age 21, he was having solo exhibitions in Europe and New York. In 1982, his work was included in the 4th Biennale of Sydney and his participation in the ‘Aperto’ section of the 41st Venice Biennale (1984) and ‘Junger Europäischer Maler (Young European Painters)’ section in the important survey exhibition, ‘Europe–Amerika: 1940 to the Present’, at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne confirmed his international reputation.

Frank’s recent paintings are distinguished by their viscous materiality, dazzling colour and layered transparency. His application of colour appears liquid, simultaneously heavy and weightless, mobile yet in suspension; the paint is dyed, and tinted varnishes, the consistency of water, are poured over the canvas. The image is literally brought to the surface through frenetic action over a period of several days as the varnishes become thicker and more complex, trapping the colours and the evidence of the process and the artist’s actions under the surface. The ostensible spontaneity of these works belies Frank’s absolute mastery of his medium; dynamic effects of moving paint that seem to run spontaneously across the canvas yet are, in fact, carefully created by hand. The ground is often left visible through passages of transparent colour, creating a depth of pictorial space and a three-dimensional aspect. The resulting chromatic arrangements are what might be called metaphysical landscapes – referring as much to the spirit or emotions as to physical spaces. Their orifices, plateaus and framed voids begin to engage the neuroses of the viewer, creating an atmosphere of psychological intensity that cannot be separated from the artist’s experience of and feelings about Australian landscape and life. This is further enhanced by the seemingly automatist nature of his working process – it is as if he were tapping into the energies of a collective unconscious.

Frank’s use of strange, long titles for his works, or the borrowing of names of young, culturally ‘cool’ male actors, adds to his paintings’ ambiguity. He refutes any possible literal or literary reference, preferring that the works contrast with their anti-linear narrative. By this he aims to widen the possibility of what may be regarded as a landscape. The works cannot be read by the eye at one glance but demand constant movement in gradations between close detail and general overview.

For the 17th Biennale of Sydney, Frank has specially made a series of paintings for the 63-metre-long gallery spaces that form part of the Turbine Hall on Cockatoo Island. This series of paintings, set in the watery depths, establish both a visually stunning metaphor of creativity in the drowning death, as well as a confluence of transcripts and anecdotes of ‘Jewboy’, an absconded 19-year-old local convict who, after years of brutality and indifference, was forced into failed revenge and ultimate drowning. Within the paintings the only light and image are those from the surrounding creatures and the flashing internal thoughts of those endless last moments. Adjacent to the sea, their fluid forms suggest both sky and water, yet they also have a dark and foreboding quality that taps into the forgotten brutal history of the island and the ambience of this convict-constructed gallery in particular.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2009 ‘The Big Black Bubble’, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, Australia
2005 ‘Dale Frank’, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Frieze Art Fair, London, UK
2000 ‘Dale Frank: Ecstasy (Twenty Years of Painting)’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia
2000 ‘Dale Frank’, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
1998 ‘Project Room’, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, USA

Selected Group Exhibitions

2008 ‘Optimism’, Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia
2007 ‘A Room Inside’, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia
2005 ‘Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize’ (Winner), Bendigo Art Gallery, Bendigo, Australia
2004 ‘Swoon’, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Australia
2002 ‘Fieldwork: Australian Art 1968–2002’, The Ian Potter Centre, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia

Selected Bibliography

Christopher Chapman, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, March 1996, pp. 14, 60–61, 102–03, 136
Christopher Chapman, ‘DFX 4’, Dale Frank: Ecstasy: Twenty Years of Painting, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2000
Christopher Chapman, So Far … The Art of Dale Frank 2005–1980, Schwartz Publishing, Melbourne, 2008
Jane Magon, Dale Frank, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1992
Sarah Stutchbury, ‘Dale Frank: Strung out in heaven’s high’, Brought to Light II: Contemporary Australian Art 1966–2006, Lynne Seear and Julia Eqington (eds), Queensland Art Gallery Publishing, Brisbane, 2007, pp. 206–11