Dale Frank

More recently working primarily on Perspex, Frank hand mixes his own colour pigments into resins which are manipulated through rhythmical actions of pouring, scraping, and layering. The resulting works are hypnotic creations that meld conceptualism and materialism, inviting viewers to participate in the performance of their reflective surfaces.

b.1959, Australia
Lives in New South Wales

Active since the 1970s, Australian artist Dale Frank has forged a decades long international career. The artist is best known for his glossy resin and Perspex artworks, though has worked in a broad range of media and modalities. Through consistently exhibiting at Gow Langsford since the 1990s, Frank has developed a dedicated following in New Zealand.

A distinctive feature of Frank’s work is the fluid effects and colour blending resulting from the use of acrylic resin. Applied wet, this medium achieves brilliant colours and a very high gloss finish. Frank often uses a bold colour palette, and this is central to the distinctive contemporary aesthetic he has developed. His work bears some relationship to American abstract expressionist painting, which favoured processes of spontaneous or subconscious creation. Through pouring liquid resin on to the painting support, Frank relinquishes some degree of control over image creation. Yet, he retains an unrelenting focus on achieving rigorous artistic outcomes. Some of Frank’s works could also be visually likened to the squeegee paintings of German artist Gerhard Richter. There are technical similarities in terms of application of medium to support.

With examples including, As the Senior Manager of Supercheap Auto Parts in Mayfield at the end of a hard day Ronald ‘Ronnie' loved a swim..., and Thai Crab pancakes with green chilli sauce gave him so much grief, Frank’suse of titles is bemusing. Such titles don’t appear to have any relationship to the content of the work. Perhaps instead they operate in line with Dadaist ideas, eschewing logic and reason in favour of nonsense and irrationality.

Frank’s exhibition history is vast. He has twice participated in the Venice Biennale, in the Aperto section in 1984 and in the collateral exhibition Personal Structures in 2013. In 2010 he exhibited at the 17^th Biennale of Sydney: The Beauty of Distance, Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age. He was recognised with a major solo retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney in 2000, and in 2005 he won the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize from the Bendigo Art Gallery. His work has been the subject of three monographs; Dale Frank, published by Craftsman House in 1992, So Far: the Art of Dale Frank 2005-1980 published by Schwatz Publishing in 2007, and most recently in 2024, Dale Frank, Artist. Artworks 2006–2023 published by Neon Parc and Perimeter Editions Melbourne, Australia. Frank is the subject of the feature length documentary Dale Frank: Nobody’s Sweetie directed by Jenny Hicks which premiered at the Sydney Film Festival in June 2024. His paintings are held in every major public collection in Australia and in numerous museum private and corporate collections in the Asia Pacific, Europe, and the United States.

Gow Langsford Gallery has represented Dale Frank since 1997.

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Gow Langsford Gallery presents a dramatic new offering from internationally acclaimed Australian artist Dale Frank (b. 1959). The gallery walls have been painted black, reimagined as a dark space, inviting an unfamiliar perspective for viewing this new vibrant collection of paintings.

Within his practice, Frank consistently subverts the medium of painting through embracing its materiality in newfound ways. His approach ignores the use of a paintbrush and traditional paints, rather embracing hand-pigmented resins that are smoothly poured and scraped upon a background of Perspex. In this new body of work Frank pushes his traditional techniques to create huge depths within these surfaces, often extending to sculptural forms on the surface of the work. These paintings are created through an interplay of deliberate action and chance, as the liquid resin takes on a life of its own, before settling into its final resting place.

There is a sense of movement within these works as though they might continue to shape-shift before our eyes. This is further amplified by the highly reflective surface of the works, which interplays with the changing light of the day and night. Frank has always been interested in how paintings can exist outside of human perception - as a unique entity, living out its days irrespective of those who gaze upon it. They don’t necessarily require context to be understood, rather being their own personality.