PADDINGTON.- For decades Dale Frank’s practice has been motivated by an experimental approach to painting, his honed manipulations of the medium testing the technical, conceptual and perceptual limits of his materials. Charged concoctions of varnish, lighter fluid and Penetrol on perspex invoke explosive and lustrous images reminiscent of celestial planes and interstellar landscapes. Will Gosling has described how Dale Frank’s “chromatic arrangements are metaphysical universes referring as much to the spirit and to emotions as to physical spaces.”[1] Yet the potency of Frank’s compositions extend beyond the picture plane, his titles extricating volatile fragments of language, before fusing them together to illuminate their absurd ponderance.

While his controlled exploitation of varnish occupied much of the artist’s focus over the last decade, SABCO PEROXIDE highlights Frank’s long-standing exploration of forms of installation, performance and sculpture. Frank describes the gesture of contemporary painting as a “conceptual practice, first by what it is not, and what it opposes.”[2] In this spirit, Frank’s 26th exhibition with Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery investigates the very edge of painting, as explosive oxygenated sculptures of compression foam and eruptive reconfigurations of readymade designer furniture, are positioned alongside paintings that protrude or dissolve, opening onto an almost sculptural, 3-dimensional space. SABCO PEROXIDE is thus an articulation of Frank’s broader conceptual hypotheses, and his ongoing empirical investigations into the potentiality of painting.

Dale Frank is one of Australia’s foremost contemporary painters. Frank’s work is currently included in Lurid Beauty: Australian Surrealism and its Echoes at the National Gallery of Victoria and Luminous World at the National Art School, Sydney. Frank was included in the 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Dark Heart at the Art Gallery of South Australia, curated by Nick Mitzevich. In 2013, his work was featured in Personal Structures at the Palazzo Bembo as part of the official program of the 55th Venice Biennale. He has been included in three Biennales of Sydney (1982, 1990 and 2010) and he was selected for the important survey exhibition, Contemporary Australia: Optimism at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2008). A major solo retrospective of his work was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney in 2000. In 1983, Frank was included in the exhibition Panorama della post - critica: critica ed arte at the Museo Palazzo Lanfranchi in Pisa along with Thomas Lawson and Anselm Kiefer. In 1984 Frank was included in the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale and Junger Europaischer Maler (Young European Painters) section in the exhibition, Europe-Amerika: 1940 to the Present, at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Frank’s paintings are held in every major public collection in Australia as well as museums worldwide, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and the Kunsthaus, Zurich. A major monograph on Dale Frank’s work So Far: the Art of Dale Frank 2005-1980 was published in 2007. Dale Frank has been represented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery since 1982.


[1] Will Gosling, New York, 2013
[2] Dale Frank, 2014