AustLit

In 1974, Dale Frank was awarded the Red Cross Art Prize, judged by John Olsen, when he was 16. He was shown in the Wynne exhibition in 1975, and had several other exhibitions before leaving Australia for Europe in 1979, determined to establish a professional art career in Europe and the United States. He never completed any formal art training, having left art college in frustration.

Frank began to make a name for himself as a performance artist with solo exhibitions in Dublin, Budapest and Milan in 1980, and London and New York in 1981. He was included in the 4th Sydney Biennale in 1982 and in that same year began a relationship with Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney, who represent Dale Frank to this day. The support of prominent curators Paul Groot and Rene Block cemented his career early on, and in 1988 Frank returned to Australia where he now lives and works, in rural Queensland.

For his entire career since the mid-1970s frank has maintained a fevered rate of art production. His art practice has progressed through countless stylistic permutations, from his early performance work, through drawing, painting, photography and interactive installations. His experimental trajectory within painting eventually led to the abstract varnish paintings for which he has been well regarded since the late-1990s

Dale Frank’s early work was performance based and often involved the artist putting himself through ordeals of physical endurance or discomfiture, or involving the audience in a psychologically intense or confusing scenario. In his 1980 work entitled Plane Breath, Frank had an assistant pile bricks around the artist’s body so that he was completely encased within them; he released himself from this symbolic tomb by expanding his diaphragm with increasingly deep breaths, slowly dismantling the structure in this way with the sound of the shifting bricks like breaking bones. In other performances Frank sought to physically prevent the audience from leaving a space or hid within the performance space and watched the confused audience in secret.

Throughout the promiscuous approach to style and medium presented by Dale Frank’s oeuvre, the unifying concept is an exploration of bodily experience. Frank’s drawings of the 1980s are immersive in terms of size and also due to the dense concentric line-work. The drawings borrow heavily from surrealism, conflating bodily and psychological tension in their depiction of stretched muscle, contorted facial features (including the ubiquitous repetition of eyes), and other body parts; insects and elements of landscape are also sucked into the swirling plane. The drawings clearly draw attention to their component materials and their own ritualistic and furious creation. Frank’s paintings quickly moved into non-representational territory, irreverently riffing on the history and forms of modernism to incorporate readymade objects, and abstract gestural paint application. He experimented with metals, poisons and industrial varnishes and eventually worked his way towards the flowing varnish paintings he is currently producing.

“One has to look at the nature of landscape painting. It is only through the arbitrary use of visible technique of, say, horizon lines, or a cross for a tree where people can get away with saying a Fred Williams is a landscape or a John Olsen is a landscape. If those artists never interpreted their work as landscape, they would not be landscape, they would be European or Oriental pointillist abstractions: it's only a mechanism by which they have attached their work to both the market and to the Australian interest in landscape.”

— Dale Frank

(quoted in - Crawford, A. No wide brown land for me, The Age http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/08/12/1060588374303.html)

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney http://www.roslynoxley9.com.au/artists/13/Dale_Frank/

Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne http://www.annaschwartzgallery.com/works/works?artist=15&c=m

Heiser Gallery, Brisbane http://www.heisergallery.com.au/artists/frank/

Gow Langsford Gallery, Aukland http://www.gowlangsfordgallery.co.nz/artists/dalefrank/