Nobody's Sweetie

Colours barge into one another as if looking for a fight, swimming into sensation.

Dale Frank's paintings are characterised by an immediacy of process and a tense urgency of vision, the method of which he has mastered over several decades. Despite the appearance of serendipity, Frank controls his dynamic and intense process to achieve highly conscious outcomes. The images are literally brought to the surface through calculated action as the varnishes becomes thicker and more complex, trapping the colours and the evidence of the process under the surface, creating a depth of pictorial space and a three dimensionality.

The resulting chromatic arrangements are metaphysical universes referring as much to the spirit and to emotions as to physical spaces. The paintings allude to the awe and wonder of all consuming black holes, powerful magnetic stars and galactic collisions, gateways that connect points in space and time leading to other dimensions, forces of gravity – it is as if he were tapping into the energies of a collective unconscious and of the abstract.

—Will Gosling, New York, 2013.

Dale Frank is one of Australia’s foremost contemporary painters. His work is currently featured in Personal Structures, Palazzo Bembo, as part of the official program of the 55th Venice Biennale. A major solo retrospective of his work was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney in 2000. He has been included in three Biennales of Sydney (1982, 1990 and 2010) and he was selected for the important survey exhibition, Contemporary Australia: Optimism at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2008). In 1983, Frank was included in the exhibition ‘Panorama della post - critica: critica ed arte’ at the Museo Palazzo Lanfranchi in Pisa along with Thomas Lawson and Anselm Kiefer. In 1984 Frank was included in the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale and ‘Junger Europaischer Maler (Young European Painters)’ section in the exhibition, ‘Europe-Amerika: 1940 to the Present’, at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Dale Frank’s paintings are held in every major public collection in Australia as well as museum and corporate collections worldwide, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and the Kunsthaus, Zurich. A major monograph on Dale Frank’s work ‘So Far: the Art of Dale Frank 2005-1980’ was published in 2007.  Dale Frank has been represented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery since 1982.