Natalie Frank is an American artist currently living and working in New York City. Her work deals with themes of power, sexuality, gender, feminism and identity. Although Frank is best known as a painter, she has also explored other mediums including sculpture and drawing. She grew up in Austin and Dallas in Texas, and was a high school National Merit Finalist, but was denied a place in the National Honor Society because of conflicts with school administrators over her drawings from life. Frank earned her bachelors in Studio Art from Yale University in 2002, and her masters in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2006. In 2003 she earned a Fulbright Scholarship to the National Academy of Fine Art in Oslo, Norway, and has also studied at the L'École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Florence Academy of Art.

Natalie Frank's work is marked by disturbing, explicit, often grotesque subject matter that revolves around themes including women, sexuality, gender and violence, blurring the line between reality and fantasy. With oil on canvas and mixed media making up the bulk of her work, Frank is praised for her classical techniques that elicit references to the fleshy figures of Francis Bacon. She also credits Edgar Degas, Diego Velazquez, Kathe Kollwitz, Francisco Goya and Robert Gober as inspirations.

In 2006, while she was still completing her masters, Frank had her first solo show at the Briggs Robinson Gallery. In 2013, Frank made her West Coast solo show debut at ACME Los Angeles. Titled ‘The Scene of Disappearance’, the show included works depicting home life through intimate and grotesque portraits of bodies set in interior spaces, blurring the line between abstraction and realism.

In 2011 Paula Rego suggested that Frank read the original, unsanitised versions of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, noting that the series embodied many of the themes present in Frank’s work. Frank was intrigued, and spent the next three years creating 75 gouache and chalk pastel drawings of 36 of the original stories, including well known tales including Rapunzel and Cinderella, as well as lesser known ones like The Lettuce Donkey. The series marked the first time Frank drew inspiration from literature, and is one of the only complex, systematic examinations of the original tales by a contemporary artist.

Natalie Frank’s website, where you can see the Grimm paintings and much more, is here.