Dana Frankfort

Life and death

February 10 - March 23, 2024

View Works

Olympia is ecstatic to present Life and Death, an exhibition of new paintings by Dana Frankfort. The press release is written by Josephine Halvorson:

The title of the exhibition is an excerpt from a 1982 interview with the painter Malcolm Morley, in which he says:

"Each brushstroke is a matter of life and death. It's a matter of identity, which I'm evolving as I go along. Through each painting, there's a riddle. I discover the riddle through doing the painting." 

This suggests pretty high stakes, as if the painter loads a brush with one's whole being and delivers it onto the canvas. But life and death is not life or death, and Dana Frankfort's work is all about the and. Her paintings are full-color spectrums that span opposites, such as language and image, oil and dust, quick notations and sludgy residues. 

For almost three decades, Frankfort has been making art that combines words and phrases with colors and gestures. She invites us to free-associate through the selection of text and its excavation in paint. These paintings are not meant to be "read" but rather "read into," an activity that depends on curiosity and interpretation, a search for meaning while resisting answers. Despite the presence of language, legibility is beside the point. Frankfort's art whistles the tunes of its lyrics but never explains them.

Anyone who has seen one of her paintings knows that Dana Frankfort makes the prettiest mud you've ever seen. She turns lavender into silver and back again, pours pools of garnet reds, and grabs an occasional handful of sky, smearing it into the canvas's weave. Her titles are plain and direct, often naming their apparent colors without invoking the preciousness of pigments. Brown/Pink/White (2023) and Gold/Brown/Rose (2017-2023) contain regions as dank and deep as peat but without signifiers of their earthy origins. 

This isn't to say that Frankfort isn't thinking about the planet. You and I Are Earth is a phrase that appears in four works of varying sizes. Like the title of the show, it's almost too heavy to take seriously, yet deadpan in its resounding truth. Living in Houston, Texas, where she grew up, Frankfort has experienced increasingly extreme weather events: floods, hurricanes, and plunging temperatures. "Houston is 'fog city', semi-tropical, heavy air, and always wet," she tells me. Frankfort lives under the big Texas sky, hazy by day and chromatic at sunset. As she drives around the city, she sees paintings through her windshield: Constable's cloud studies, Frank Bowling's fiery maps, and Ed Clark's gradated horizons. Like the French Impressionists, Frankfort applies tubed color, the products of industrialization and the earth itself, to evoke the atmospheric conditions of pollution and the terrain beneath. 
Frankfort’s landscape is not all air and light and weather. It’s littered with billboard signage, candy wrappers, hashtags, and 17th-century hand-lettered plates recovered from the sewers of London, which she spotted on Instagram last year. Fragments of language surface, dimensional and vivid, material and mutable. Her paintings make me wonder what happens to all the language we encounter. Does it scratch our psyches or blur into passing thoughts? Here, Frankfort proposes a way to loosen this riddle. She paints words that stick to color and form, while contending with everything else that is left to wash out to sea.

Dana Frankfort is a painter based in Houston, Texas. She has attended residencies including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Yaddo and Ox-Bow, and the MFAH Core Studio Art Program. Her work has been written about in Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, and others. Frankfort has been a recipient of an Artadia grant as well as the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Frankfort’s paintings are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, Rice University, Houston, TX, St. Edward's University, Austin and The Jewish Museum, New York, NY. She received a BA from Brandeis University and an MFA from Yale University.

Josephine Halvorson is an artist who makes paintings from observation. Encountering objects and surfaces, she describes the effects of weather, time, and feeling through the physical world. Halvorson is Professor of Art & Chair of Graduate Studies in Painting at Boston University.