Art

For Natalie Frank, drawing and painting are both intimate and expansive. She began her professional career as a figurative painter: large-scale works on canvas portrayed domestic scenes and power dynamics, particularly within sexuality, gender identity, history and religion. She continues to hone a unique practice focusing on feminist tales and fables using vibrantly charged figuration to reveal powerful voices of resistance in iconic literary works. In paper pulp painting, Frank fuses her layered approach to drawing and its intense color with her paintings’ gestural and rendered hand. By pouring, moving, dividing, or combining viscous hand-pigmented paper pulp with brushes, spoons, and sticks, and using it as paint, Frank sculpts intimate portraits of anxious females, some eating their hair, others closing their eyes in anguish or peace. Frank’s approach is painterly, working against the natural tendency of paper pulp to settle, she agitates these surfaces with bravura brushwork. These paper pulp paintings were made at Dieu Donné through their illustrious Sponsorship Program. Natalie Frank (b. 1980 Austin, Texas) lives and works in Brooklyn. Recent solo exhibitions include O, at Half Gallery, New York (2018), and Dancers and Dominas at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago (2015). She is a Fulbright Scholar and her work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of Art, New York, the Yale University Art Museum, New Haven, the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, and the Burger Collection, Hong Kong. This past March she completed a large-scale commission for Grimm Tales, a full-length performance at Ballet Austin. Her forthcoming book, The Island of Happiness: Fairy Tales of Madame d’Aulnoy, for which she also wrote the preface, will be published by Princeton University Press in 2020. She has two other publications currently available at Salon 94: The Story of O, an erotic novel (Lucia/Marquad, Seattle, 2017), and Tales of the Brothers Grimm: Drawings by Natalie Frank (Damiani, 2015).