• INSIGHT: WEEK 2 | NATALIE FRANK

    24 - 30 JUNE

     

     

  • INSIGHT IS A NEW ONLINE PLATFORM PRESENTED BY PIPPY HOULDSWORTH GALLERY DEBUTING WORK BY A DIFFERENT ARTIST EACH WEEK. NEW WORK MADE DURING LOCKDOWN WILL BE HIGHLIGHTED ALONGSIDE A VIDEO STUDIO VISIT PRESENTED BY THE ARTIST.

  • INSIGHT: WEEK 2 | Natalie frank

  • Natalie Frank’s practice centres the figure, locating her characters at the intersection of reality and imagination. Exploring narratives of power and transgression, Frank adopts a playful, theatrical, and at times, perverse approach to the desires and anxieties that pervade our everyday life. Her practice incorporates painting, drawing and pulp paper media. With vivid use of colour, each work presents a layered, shifting surface composed of graphic, gestural and decorative elements. Drawing on literary source material, with particular focus on the female protagonists of fairy tales and fables, Frank addresses uncomfortable or taboo themes, including gendered violence, female empowerment and sexuality.

  • Natalie Frank, Mira I, 2019-2020

    MIRA I

    2019-2020

    gouache and chalk pastel on paper

    76.2 x 55.9 cm, 30 x 22 in

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    A blonde woman stares out with head lifted slightly, avoiding the gaze of the viewer. Her features are bold and unapologetic: full lips, a prominent nose and large blue eyes that reflect the colour of the sky. She towers a full head and shoulders above the horizon with her arms lifted high in a gesture of strength, seemingly unaware of the small figures tumbling about her form in a state of distress. Mira I belongs to Frank's series that responds to the stories of Madame d'Aulnoy, a French writer working in the 17th century who was the first to describe her work as contes de fées or fairytales. Her writing, progressive in its treatment of women, is brilliantly dark and witty, reflecting the complex and unconventional life of its author. Madame d'Aulnoy's tale of Mira narrates the story of a woman whose beauty causes death and destruction to those around her. Indifferent to the consequences of her power, she meets her end the same way, dying for the unrequited love of a man more disdainful than herself.

     

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  • Natalie Frank, The Madame’s House (Angela Carter), 2019-2020

    THE MADAME’S HOUSE (ANGELA CARTER)

    2019-2020

    gouache and chalk pastel on paper

    111.8 x 228.6 cm, 44 x 90 in
    $ 58,000.00 (plus $2,500 frame)

     

    The Madame's House develops Frank's embrace of the fundamental unsavoury nature of fairytales, taking inspiration from The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman, a novel by Angela Carter. The story is a Magical Realist romp where imagination takes over the world. Frank's tableau presents a riotous brothel scene where the boundaries between human, animal and object blur into carnival of appetite and lust. Women are turning into clocks, even as they embrace their clients, whilst exotic animals come to life as furniture. Layering gouche and chalk pastel, Frank builds an alternating picture of reality and illusion where desires manifest and meet their image.

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  • 'Imagine a time (now), a place (here and everywhere), where wicked sorcerers lurk in our highest offices, where power has been perverted not in the darkness but under the glow of the sun.' 

    Natalie Frank, Modern Painters, 2015

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  • 'Frank’s versions of the familiar and not-so-familiar tales are un-syrupy and anti-Disneyesque, sometimes gruesome. Cruelty and crude eroticism, magic and bizarre fantasy, mark their folkloristic roots; weirdness and irrationality distance them from both everyday life and the moralism of happily ever after.' 

    Linda Nochlin, Natalie Frank: The Dark Side of the Fairy Tale, 2015

  • About Natalie Frank

    About Natalie Frank

    Natalie Frank (b.1980) lives and works in New York. She holds a BA from Yale University (2002) and a MFA from Colombia University, School of the Arts, New York (2006). Solo institutional exhibitions include The Drawing Center, New York; The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, Austin and University of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington. Frank has upcoming solo museum exhibitions at The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison (2021) and Brattleboro Museum of Art, Vermont (2021). Her work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Blanton Museum of Art, TX; The Brooklyn Museum, NY; The Weatherspoon Museum, NC; Montclair Art Museum, NJ; The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, PA; Williams College Museum of Art, MA; The Kemper Art Museum, MO; and the The Rose Art Museum, MA amongst others.

  • 'The less I understand what I’m looking at in these luminous, densely packed works, the more exhilarating I find them.' 

    Barry Schwabsky, Artforum, 2015

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