Dale Frank’s paintings are an experiment in raw chemistry, time, and motion. Perhaps the most prolific, radical, and singular Australian artist of his generation, Frank’s work – made by pouring and layering varnish over prolonged periods – embodies the transgressive power of art-making. It is alchemy and abstraction in one turbulent, bubbling, mirror-slick concoction; intensely deliberate, but searing with a kind of dirt under-your-fingernails psychedelic energy.
The major book Dale Frank, Artist. Artworks 2006–2023 features an immense selection of key works produced over the past seventeen years, a period in which Frank has pushed the limits of his output even further, experimenting with new materials including horror masks, human hair wigs, chocolate fountains, designer furniture, and filmmaking. In many instances, traditional paint is replaced with industrial materials such as resin, varnish, glass, epoxies, and fake blood. Designed by Stuart Geddes and Žiga Testen – and featuring major new texts by Edward Colless, Erik Jensen, Amelia Winata, and Georgina Reid – this vast book operates in a similarly radical fashion. Juxtaposing and layering Frank’s works over British fashion photographer Ben Morris’s frenetic, high-flash images of the artist’s home, studio, and surrounds, the book offers a dazzling, unsteadying encounter with a practice and a life that clash, coalesce, and collapse in on one another.
Painting presents both the artist’s ‘lifeness’ and ‘liveliness’ in the form of a material object, which is not reducible, and that non-reducibility might be its special attraction. Painting’s capacity to appear saturated with the life – and the labour time – of the artist, while remaining distinct from it, makes it the ideal candidate for value production in the new economy; the contemporary experience that is busy absorbing life. – Dale Frank, 2020
408 pages, 27.5 x 37 cm, hardcover, Neon Parc x Perimeter Editions (Melbourne).