New York, NY - PALO Gallery is pleased to present “Companion,” an exhibition of artist Natalie Frank’s work. Natalie Frank (b. 1980) is an interdisciplinary artist whose oil paintings, gouache and chalk pastels, paper paintings, and ceramics, focus primarily on the intersections of feminism, sexuality, and violence. Across media, Frank’s oeuvre highlights the precarious state of women and their bodies throughout history, particularly in relation to erotic literature and fairy tales, but also within contemporary discourse surrounding such themes as sex work.
This series of works investigates the symbiotic relationships between women and animals in fairy tales and the power in their pairings. In the history of art there has long been the genre painting of men with their subservient animals, and Frank challenges this archetype by portraying women on a more equitable level with their animal companions—hinting at the difference in a need to dominate amongst men and women. Frank is drawn to fairy tales because they began as women’s tales, records of what life was like for women during specific times and in certain places, passed along orally through communal connections in traditionally femininely gendered spaces. Frank believes that women’s histories have been sanitized and coopted—that they are used to moralize to women and children to correct and influence behavior in a way that pleases the patriarchy. In this series, Frank is able to restore power to historical women, granting them depiction through the female gaze as opposed to the male gaze.
Art history is rich with a history of portraits of men and their hunting dogs, armor, and horses; Frank sees her pairings as a way to insert women and their identities, desires, and sexuality, into a history of portraiture.