merchant house

amesterdam holland
seeing is reliving: celebrating jan frank
paintings and drawings, october 2013

The Merchant House is pleased to announce its inaugural exhibition dedicated to the art of Jan Frank (American, b. Amsterdam, 1951), the artist’s first show in Amsterdam in over 20 years. The exhibition is focused on the Plywood Paintings from 1993–1998 but will also present important new work. Given Jan Frank’s international stature, with numerous solo shows and curatorial projects in New York City and internationally over three decades, his presence in Amsterdam is long overdue.

As early as 1998, B. H. Friedman, the late American art critic (most famous for the first biography of Jackson Pollock) wrote: “For over twenty years and through ten solo shows, Jan Frank has been obsessed by line.” Now in 2013, fifteen years and many more shows later, Frank is still fully committed to the sprawling and sensual curve. And when confronted with his work, we, the viewers, are obsessed and seduced in turn: do the clusters of seemingly aleatory lines and swirls conjure organic shapes, images of reclining nudes or landscapes with winding rivers, flights of birds, traces of melodies or dance?

In the first period of his career, Frank used the line as a mode of appropriation. He borrowed pictorial elements of admired predecessors, from de Kooning and Guston to Mondrian and van Gogh, and showed that painting could both join and confront the “art of not making” that has pervaded the world of art after Duchamp. In the Weltanschauung of the 1980s and 1990s, Frank hid his artistic mastery behind the appropriated line and ingeniously revealed it compositionally, using simple commercial quality Wite-Out as a new medium. In a bold and unsurprising reversal, he changed everything around in the works that followed. This time, the deadly inorganic Wite- Out blocks, distorts, or suddenly stops Frank’s own rigorous curves— like a chance accident that can stop or change a seemingly predictable course of events. These recent works reveal the firm hand and a masterstroke of a true grandmaster through and through.

Jan Frank’s last show at Paul Kasman’s was listed third in 2011’s Top Ten in Painting by the Art In America magazine. And it is only fitting that the works from different periods of his distinguished career can now be seen in Amsterdam, installed by Jan Frank himself.

Selected Works: Drawing
Crushed for john chamberlain series 2, 2012+

@ 27x17 Dutch Linen Paper / Alkyd / Ink 

Selected Works: paintings

Oil silkscreen on linen