Dale Frank | 'The Days Past Quicklyas If He Had Nothing To Anticipate, 2011' | 160x120cm
- Regular price
- $60,000.00 AUD
- Sale price
- $60,000.00 AUD
- Regular price
-
Code: MADF11001
Artist: Dale Frank
Title: The Days Past Quicklyas If He Had Nothing To Anticipate
Area: Hunter Valley, NSW
Medium: Varnish And Pigment On Canvas
Size: 160x120cm
Year: 2011
Dale Frank has worked with poured varnish since the mid-1990s, moving from near-monochrome fields into saturated colour from 2002 onward. The paint is never brushed into shape so much as released - tilted, pooled and left to find its own paths across the surface, so that the finished picture is really a record of chemistry and gravity rather than a drawn image. Frank has always been clear that these works are not pictures of anything; they are demonstrations of how his materials behave when he lets them move.
Dale Frank is one of Australia's most prominent contemporary abstract painters. Born in Singleton in the Hunter Valley in 1959, he won a Red Cross art award at sixteen (presented by John Olsen), left for Europe and the United States at nineteen, and showed at the Biennale of Sydney in 1982 and the Aperto of the Venice Biennale in 1984 before returning to live in Australia in 1998. From the mid-1990s varnish became his principal material - first in near-monochrome, then from 2002 in saturated colour, poured, tilted and layered so that the paint's own flow and chemistry make the image. He later moved from canvas to Perspex, which lets the pooled, glassy surfaces read as objects as much as pictures. Beyond painting his practice has taken in found-object sculpture, performance and drawing, but it is the biomorphic varnish works, with their marbled, molten depth, that he is best known for. He won the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize in 2005, had a survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in 2000 and showed in the 17th Biennale of Sydney in 2010, and in 2014 gave 85 works valued at four million dollars to the National Gallery of Australia - the largest gift by a living artist since Arthur Boyd's in 1975. He is represented by Roslyn Oxley9 and Neon Parc.