Where Angels Fear to Tread: Dale Frank Drawings 1980-1992

About the exhibition
This exhibition constituted a twelve-year survey of drawings by Australian artist Dale Frank and marked the first presentation dedicated to his works on paper. Best known as a painter with an anarchic and iconoclastic sensibility, since 1980 Frank had also produced an extensive body of drawings—mostly created and exhibited internationally across Europe and the United States. Where Angels Fear to Tread marked the first time many of these works had been shown in Australia.

As art critic Ashley Crawford discerned in the exhibition’s catalogue, ‘there is no easy reading or referencing of Dale Frank’s work.’ Yet across the stylistic shifts and complex, multi-textured surfaces of his drawings, recurring motifs such as the eye, the face, the moon and elements of genitalia emerge as part of the artist’s symbolic language.

Ultimately, the exhibition sought to articulate the tension at the core of Frank’s practice: the possibilities of artistic self-expression set against his critique of the authoritarianism constructed by modernist styles of twentieth-century art.

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^{Image: Dale Frank, The Critic's Bladder (Portrait of Paul Foss) 1992, pencil and Art & Australia images on paper, 275 x 297 cm. Collection of the artist}