Dale Frank (B. 1959)

Dale Frank (B. 1959)

Biography

Born in 1959, Australian artist Dale Frank creates paintings that traverse between solid and liquid, minimalist and expressionist, purity and the abject. Over a 36-year career, Frank has explored painting’s potential through experimentations of materials and process that challenge the concept of painting by embracing the full physical transformation process of the medium itself.

Using universal codes such as colour and form, Frank engages with the audience on a subconscious level. He transports this non-verbal communication to another parallel dimension, as if his paintings were a kind of wormhole to another universe.

The pigmented varnishes melt and fold into abstract impressions, and unique unexpected colours from acrid pastel pink to cobalt blue are utilized. Bound to reflective Perspex, the works create immersive and mirrored distortions, and they emit both a pop sheen and jewel-like luminosity.

Frank’s work titles inject a social and psychological element and sardonic bite. His recent paintings enact biological and chemical processes that are analogous to synaptic and molecular experiments. Like living beings, the painted surfaces continue to flow and rupture. Frank remains unsure with its outcome but always faithful with his process and formal decision making. As Frank claims: “Painting should formally create a kind of schizophrenia among the mediums and aesthetics, an abstract conceptual schizophrenia”. The work in its pure form exists only where you are not looking at it, for it is the afterimage in the viewer’s mind is where the work lies.

Selected solo exhibitions include Dale Frank (2021), Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand; Shaun taught piano (2020), Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Australia; Dale Frank (2018), Sabco Peroxide (2016), and Toby Jugs (2014), Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Australia; Dale Frank (2017), Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong.

Selected group exhibitions include Accidents[Part II] (2020), Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong, China; Penumbra (2019), Olsen Gruin Gallery, New York, USA; Dystopian Forms (2018), Pearl Lam Galleries H Queen’s, Hong Kong, China; Every Brilliant Eye: Australian Art of the 1990’s (2017), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia.