“I like that painting can seduce, that the content can be provocative, sublime, and aggressive at the same time. You never know what you are looking at. The reflective surface is like escapism; it shows the image of something that happens somewhere else. The work in its pure form, it could be said, exists only when you are NOT looking at it. In a way you never know what the work is, conceptually speaking. Painting today must live with its own contradictions, in the ugliness of its own beauty, and in the beauty of its own impossibility.” Dale Frank Dale Frank, born in New South Wales, Australia in 1959 is one of Australia’s foremost contemporary artists. Since the 1970s, Frank has enjoyed a successful international career as a conceptual artist. Best known for his vivacious abstract paintings, his multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, drawing, performance, film, and installation, all of which adhere closely to his experimental approach to new materialities. For decades Frank’s practice has been motivated by his ongoing empirical investigations into the potentiality of painting, finding new abilities and power in painting as integral and crucial to understanding art today. Dale Frank’s abstract paintings have been exhibited internationally since the 1980s, showing at PS1, New York, in 1981, the 1982 Biennale of Sydney, 42nd Venice Biennale in 1984, and in 1983, Frank was included in the exhibition Panorama della post - critica: critica ed arte at the Museo Palazzo Lanfranchi in Pisa along with Thomas Lawson and Anselm Kiefer. Frank’s work has gained international recognition including solo exhibitions at the MoMA PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York in 1981 and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in 2000. This will be his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, opening February 2023. “I see what is there, and what crucially more I have to do to go beyond definitions of beauty and art, and beyond yourself. You must always go beyond yourself to what you imagine art can NOT dare to be in your own time”. — Dale Frank, 2023 “The tension of opposites is necessary, strife is necessary, be it even just a ‘contradiction’. It is ‘war’ rather than peace or stillness that demonstrates the changes or flux that is the root of being, of everything, that makes it clear that nothing, not even the most stable seeming is really at rest. The same in Art”. — Dale Frank, 1983 “I disagree with the idea that artworks exist only insofar as they are available for human viewing. Artworks tend to be more interested in pointing out how they exist, act, and “live” beyond the realms of the artist, the viewer and of human perception, a paradox of sorts given the contrived nature of art- works”. — Dale Frank, 2020 “I like that painting can seduce, fondle you, that the content can be provocative, sublime, and an aggressive kick in the groin at the same time”. — Dale Frank, 2019 “Painting’s capacity to appear saturated with the life—and the labor time—of the artist, while remaining distinct from it, makes it the ideal candidate for value production in this new economy, the contemporary experience that is busy absorbing and erasing life”. — Dale Frank, 2019 “The reflective surface is like escapism; it shows the image of something that happens somewhere else. The work, the Art in its pure form, it must be said, exists only when you are NOT looking at it. In a way you never know what the work is, you can never see the Art for what it really is, how it really independently exists, conceptually speaking. For gazing into it, you are reflected back, in all your distortions and hollowness, adding yourself into the mix, disrupting the plane of honest reality. You become the commerce”. — Dale Frank, 2018 Gruin Gallery is located at 8270 Santa Monica Blvd. Street parking is available on the side streets N Harper Ave & N Sweetzer Ave. Open Thursday - Saturdays 11-5pm or by appointment. COVER IMAGE: Dale Frank, Dale Frank, Ben, 42yo, lives alone, has his bedroom walls covered in posters of Jack Noseworthy, and shelves full of Noseworthyfilm memorabilia, 2022, Color pigments in epoxyglass, on perspex, 78 3/4 x 78 3/4 “ (200 x 200 cm) Image courtesy of the artist