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INSIGHT: WEEK 2 | NATALIE FRANK
24 - 30 JUNE -
INSIGHT IS A NEW ONLINE PLATFORM PRESENTED BY PIPPY HOULDSWORTH GALLERY DEBUTING WORK BY A DIFFERENT ARTIST EACH WEEK. NEW WORK MADE DURING LOCKDOWN WILL BE HIGHLIGHTED ALONGSIDE A VIDEO STUDIO VISIT PRESENTED BY THE ARTIST.
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INSIGHT: WEEK 2 | Natalie frank
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Natalie Frank’s practice centres the figure, locating her characters at the intersection of reality and imagination. Exploring narratives of power and transgression, Frank adopts a playful, theatrical, and at times, perverse approach to the desires and anxieties that pervade our everyday life. Her practice incorporates painting, drawing and pulp paper media. With vivid use of colour, each work presents a layered, shifting surface composed of graphic, gestural and decorative elements. Drawing on literary source material, with particular focus on the female protagonists of fairy tales and fables, Frank addresses uncomfortable or taboo themes, including gendered violence, female empowerment and sexuality.
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'Imagine a time (now), a place (here and everywhere), where wicked sorcerers lurk in our highest offices, where power has been perverted not in the darkness but under the glow of the sun.'
Natalie Frank, Modern Painters, 2015
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'Frank’s versions of the familiar and not-so-familiar tales are un-syrupy and anti-Disneyesque, sometimes gruesome. Cruelty and crude eroticism, magic and bizarre fantasy, mark their folkloristic roots; weirdness and irrationality distance them from both everyday life and the moralism of happily ever after.'
Linda Nochlin, Natalie Frank: The Dark Side of the Fairy Tale, 2015
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'The less I understand what I’m looking at in these luminous, densely packed works, the more exhilarating I find them.'
Barry Schwabsky, Artforum, 2015