ARTIST PROFILE
DALE FRANK
or urban or garden design. But there is also an
inflationary ambition in this term that looms when
both expanded painting and sculpture don’t just
break down their disciplinary borders in trade and
trade-off but also territorialise their environments
(architecture, landscape, cyberspace, museum, art
market) – and, ironically, when the inverse happens.
In this respect, the expanding field of painting
or sculpture aspires to a “supercultural” systemic
state, a kind of denatured ecology. This is not the
same as the modernist vision of a “total work of
art”, which was a harmonious synthesis of media,
amalgamated and integrated in the functions and
aesthetics of a wall, a room, a building or a city.
Instead, this mode of expansion assumes a higher
dimensional state than any such localised spaces.
And this inflationary expansion of a medium is not
necessarily benign; it can be catastrophic. It is not
a raid or a trade; it is a blitz, a supernova.
We need both senses of “expansion” to handle
Dale Frank’s art.
He might justifiably proclaim that the word
“art” is the single suggestive sublimation for all
his miscreant and marvellous objects and deeds,
and the mad or diabolical experiences they offer
us. Even then, we’re still struck by the need and
the compulsion to find words to account for what
Frank manages to do so surprisingly and fluently
with his materials, with medium and with mean-
ing. We have to resort to far more complex, nu-
anced and yet I’d say also hyperbolic language to
cope with his characteristic profligacy and with the
prodigal, maverick shape-shifting and ebulliently
mongrel stylistic frenzies that twist and tunnel
and gallop and swagger throughout more than
30 years of unstoppable and aberrant creativity.
Frank’s art is immodest, defiant and extrava-
gant – usually igniting in a compound of bristling
mockery fused with exultant virtuosity – and it
warrants these qualities in any response worthy to
it. Recall his darkly surrealist, epically automatic
and fetishistic drawings in the 1980s, which were
forged from overlaid linear whorls that staked
out sinewy contour lines of monstrous masks
and bodily organs. Think of the viscous deluges^1- // Dale Frank, He could never escape the nickname
Queensland Bottle Tree which stuck after a drunken
prank, 2016. Tinted resin and compression foam on
Perspex, 160 x 120 x 12cm.
COURTESY: THE ARTIST AND GOW LANGSFORD GALLERY, AUCKLAND - // Dale Frank, Filling his empty hollow hours with
Cherry Ripes, 2016. Varnish on Perspex, 200 x 150cm.
COURTESY: THE ARTIST AND NEON PARC, MELBOURNE
FRANK’S VISUAL IDIOM IS IRREPRESSIBLY
FEBRILE AND LUSCIOUS ... AND CORRUPT.