Zoey Frank: The Human Touch

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Zoey Frank: The Human Touch

  Strolling around the Mokum Gallery in Amsterdam on a busy weekday afternoon, gazing back at the resplendent paintings by Colorado based pain

A Line Meant
THP Daak
Self and Cosmos

 

Strolling around the Mokum Gallery in Amsterdam on a busy weekday afternoon, gazing back at the resplendent paintings by Colorado based painter Zoey Frank, one feels at home. Her solo exhibition ‘At Home with Things’ creates a form of tenderness between the audience and the objects that enclose the spectators. Frank has created and transformed everyday objects and spaces into a sophisticated method of refabricating a location.

 

Frank’s oil paintings for some maybe a discovery of self, as a cherished outcome of person-object relations whereby one feels her work to be an emotionally charged experience. A sense of play and intimacy are involved.

 

Zoey Frank, was born in Boulder, Colorado in 1987. She completed four years of classical atelier training under Juliette Aristides at Gage Academy of Art in Seattle, and received an MFA in painting from Laguna College of Art and Design. She has received numerous honors and awards, including three Elizabeth Greenshields grants, the Avigdor Arikha Memorial International Residency Scholarship, the Artist’s Magazine All Media Competition Grand Prize of 2012, the Hudson River Fellowship in 2012, scholarships from the Albert K. Murray foundation, the Stacey Foundation and the Art Renewal Center. Her work has been featured in Fine Art Connoisseur, American Art Collector, the International Artist Magazine, Artist’s Magazine, and Southwest Art, and the Figurative Artists Handbook, among other publications, and is exhibited in galleries across the United States and Europe.

 

For this exhibition, Frank has investigated how residential spaces are gradually assembled over time. Frank is interested in the way objects accumulate and collect: in corners, at offices, in studios.
There is a kind of intimacy between ourselves and the objects that surround us.

 

For the artist, these objects do not necessarily have an exceptional significance; they are inexpensive, they are often manufactured and are easily non-refundable and consumable. The colors are stylistically characterised by gestural applications and there is careful attention to detail. We still live with these objects and use them in everyday situations: throwing something out of the fridge, brushing one’s teeth or throwing stuff in the trashcan. Ethereal, alluring with strong composition, exquisite drawing skills and a sense of historical painting techniques, Frank’s pieces are psychologically charged. Distinctly the technical side of painting is extremely important to her, she is engaged with the work by using the skills she has acquired.

 

Light and movement are a journey for Frank; there is mobility in her paintings, which exercise displacement.

 

Look at light and admire its beauty. Close your eyes, and then look again: what you saw is no longer there; and what you will see later is not yet Leonardo da Vinci

 

 

(Note: All images are courtesy of Galerie Mokum, Amsterdam)

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