Part of The Dale Frank Gift is the painting, Art critics make great fat chicks between flannelette sheets (2001); supplied
Dale Frank, described by the National Gallery of Australia as ‘one of Australia’s most significant contemporary painters’, today has gifted a suite of paintings, drawings and multi-media collages valued at $4 million.
‘Dale Frank’s generous donation to the Gallery is the most significant gift by a living artist since the Arthur Boyd Gift in 1975,’ said NGA Director Ron Radford AM.
‘I have long held the belief that at an appropriate time in an artist’s career, in an artists’ life, the ‘Gifting’ of a body of the artists’ work to the public is incumbent, is vital for sustaining cultural life,’ said Dale Frank.
Radford added the gift presents a remarkable opportunity to show the breadth of an artist’s output across their working life.
‘Included in the Gift is an outstanding, greatly sought after group of recent paintings, some of which were exhibited at the Sydney Biennale in 2010. There are also many other remarkably important, less well-known works that reveal Frank’s capacities across a range of media,’ said Radford.
The group of works in this Gift covers a period of 32 years, from massive drawings seen only in Italy and New York between 1980 and 1982, to the paintings produced for the 2010 Sydney Biennale.
Senior Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture post-1920, Deborah Hart, said: ‘A performative dimension has been a significant aspect of Frank’s art from the late 1970s through to the present. He is also a truly great colourist with a keen sense of the tactile, inherent qualities of materials, reflected in many remarkable works gifted to the National Gallery.
Frank’s (Self portrait – the secret) Frank love and understanding (1993) is among the earlier paintings gifted; courtesy the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
‘His colour ranges from acid greens and velvet blacks of earlier works, to vibrant post-Pop imagery, to veils of precise colour in his monochromes and more recent luscious “poured” paintings. These works reflect Frank’s ever-deepening awareness of the ways in which time, flow and inter-relationships have occurred in the application of paint itself. They are evocative paintings, like “landscapes of mind”,’ added Hart.
The gallery said that among his many exhibitions Panorama della Post-Critica at Museo Palazzo Lanfranchi, Italy, in 1983 saw Frank’s paintings shown alongside those of Anselm Kiefer and Thomas Lawson in an influential three-artist exhibition.
Frank was also invited to exhibit in Aperto in the 1984 Venice Biennale and his work was included in the 20th century survey exhibition and seminal publication, Europe-America: 1940 to the present, Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany in 1986. Frank’s work also featured in three Sydney Biennales (1982, 1990 and 2010) and the recent Adelaide Biennale 2014.
‘Frank is an artist of national and international significance and we are very grateful that he chose to make such a significant gift to the national collection,’ Radford concluded.
A selection of works from The Dale Frank Gift are currently on display at the gallery.
