PAST OVER AND FUTURES MARKET. HE HAD BEEN WAITING FOR CLINTON CROSS FOR ALMOST 10 YEARS, 2009
DALE FRANK
varnish on linen
200.0 x 200.0 cm
signed and dated twice verso: Dale Frank 2009
Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 2009
Dale Frank's sumptuous, radiant canvases are nothing if not engrossing. His large-scale varnish works are visceral experiments in abstraction that draw you into their sensuous, glistening surfaces and illicit powerful emotional reactions. Although exhibiting a more restricted palette that some of Frank's earlier works, the colours employed in our work are no less vivid nor less complex; here we encounter lavish silver, great depths of black and a shock of pink, coalescing into a truly mesmerising composition.
What seems to evolve out of these swirling, streaky surges of molten paint are the loose shapes of nature; mountains, skies, ravines. But Frank explicitly disdains the comparison of his pictures to literal landscapes. As he clarified in 2003, 'If people broadened their perceptions of what landscape is, and the history of Australian landscape painting, they would be able to embrace what is, on the surface, non-representational art as landscape instantaneously. To the average person, landscape is non-representational, it is an abstract concept.'1 The addition of oblique, sentence-long non-sequitur titles for each of his works from this period further reinforces this point. These titles refuse to provide a literal explication for their paintings because none is deserved.
Despite appearances, Frank's ability to produce such wonderfully loose and organic applications of colour is not the result of chance. The artist has complete control over the painstaking process through which his works are created. Frank pours his viscous coloured varnish onto the horizontal canvas with absolute precision, directing the bleeds of paint by manipulating wedges and blocks beneath the surface of the painting. 'It is a totally hands on and cerebral way of painting - much more intense than a half-centimetre brush and tubes of oil paint. The process can take up to twenty-four hours where I have to be permanently standing over the painting, constantly considering every minute aspect.'2
Frank has had a remarkable career both in Australia and internationally which began when the artist was awarded the prestigious Red Cross Art Award by John Olsen at the age of just 16. Across the next five years Frank achieved international recognition with solo exhibitions across Australia, Europe and America. He has exhibited alongside eminent artists including Anselm Kiefer and Thomas Lawson, and was included in the 1984 Venice Biennale. In 2000, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney held a survey exhibition of his work titled Ecstasy: 20 years of painting, and in 2005, Frank won the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize at the Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria.
1. Frank, cited in Crawford, A., 'No wide brown land for me', The Age, 13 August 2003
2. Frank, cited in Crawford, A., 'Dale Frank', Art and Australia, vol. 42, no. 2, 2004, p. 214
LEAH CROSSMAN