Mary Frank:
The Feeling of What Happens
Paintings & Sculpture
October 1 - November 1, 2003

The Feeling of What Happens marks Mary Frank's fourth exhibition at DC Moore Gallery. Throughout her career, Mary Frank has worked with enormous accomplishment in sculpture, painting, drawing, and printmaking. Such diversity of interest accurately suggests that her primary loyalty is not to a particular way of working or to any one medium or subject but rather to the power of direct expression and to the act of creation itself. The exhibition will be supplemented by a color catalogue of recent work with an essay by Martica Sawin.

Recent paintings, triptychs, and works on paper, as well as ceramic and bronze sculpture from the 1970s and 1980s will be included in The Feeling of What Happens. The exhibition will explore salient themes that are common to and have recurred over the years in both the artist's two and three-dimensional work. Specifically, the motif of landscape as it is expressed through the mountains, chasms, oceans, rivers, trees and grasses that appear frequently in her paintings, often with a human presence, and are echoed in her sculpture. Some of Mary Frank's most recent paintings and drawings incorporate architectural shapes that were inspired by the ancient adobe walls of a Spanish farm first seen by the artist from a train window. These structures are suggestive of both a human presence on the land, as well as also being seen as labyrinths.

Mary Frank's sculptures of the 1970s and 1980s, while figurative, also imply elements of the landscape - the curve of a bent leg echoing the projection of a mountain that falls precipitously away into a chasm. Limbs radiating out like the branches of a tree, or fabric formed out of clay flowing around the body like a river, while striations in the clay, or the imprint of leaves, put the viewer in mind of fossils. The large clay figures are composed of individual pieces of ceramic. As Hayden Herrera describes it in her monograph on the artist: "Fragmentation could imply the sensation of a limb's separateness, triggered, for example, by the tingle of sun and salt on a bare arm, or by water lapping at a foot. The detached limb's openness to space also expresses the almost pleasurable tug of mortality we sometimes feel when we are most alive - flesh sinking into and merging with earth, water, and air. Conversely, the spaces between forms could express the idea of a figure being born out of the earth. The sculptor performs her own kind of genesis: clay becomes flesh, a body becomes landscape, landscape becomes clay."

Mary Frank has been the subject of a number of solo museum and gallery exhibitions over the years, including an in-depth look at her Persephone Series at the Brooklyn Museum in 1988, Natural Histories -- organized by the DeCordova Museum in 1988 which traveled to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Everson Museum of Art in 1989, and a retrospective exhibition of sculpture, prints and drawings organized by the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, New York in 1978. In 2000, the Neuberger presented a major traveling retrospective of the artist's paintings, Encounters, which was accompanied by a book by Linda Nochlin, published by Abrams. Earlier this year, a solo exhibition of Mary Frank's recent paintings was organized by the Marsh Art Gallery, University of Richmond. Titled Experiences, it traveled to the Provincetown Art Association.