Artists

Jan Frank is a Dutch-American painter and curator whose career has traversed photorealism, video-sculpture, appropriation, and abstraction. Moving to the United States as a child, he came of age in the charged political atmosphere of the early 1970s at the University of Wisconsin–Madison before relocating to New York in 1975 to join the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Since then, he has lived and worked in the same downtown Manhattan loft, deeply embedded in the city’s cultural and artistic milieu.

Frank’s early works included large-scale photorealist canvases, followed in the late 1970s by pioneering video-sculpture installations. In the 1990s, he produced Xerox drawings and plywood “appropriation” paintings informed by Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, and Louise Bourgeois, as well as politically charged works based on abstracted motifs of Nixon and Kissinger. Since 2000, he has concentrated on abstract drawings and large-scale paintings, often derived from the nude female form, balancing lyricism with gestural intensity. He has collaborated with artists including Sherrie Levine, Cady Noland, and John Chamberlain, with whom he produced a suite of drawings exhibited alongside Chamberlain’s sculpture at Nahmad Contemporary (2014).

His work has been shown internationally at galleries such as Salvatore Ala, Danese, Paul Kasmin, Postmasters, Valeria Belvedere, and Tim Olsen, as well as at the Fodor Museum and the Merchant’s House in Amsterdam. His paintings and drawings are represented in major private and public collections.

Alongside his studio practice, Frank is also an active curator. He has organized exhibitions at venues including Billy Lee Thompson Gallery and Whitebox Art Center in New York. His projects include Wiser Than God (a counterpoint to the New Museum’s Younger Than Jesus, featuring artists over 83) and retrospectives of Hyman Bloom and others.