Matt franks

22 October - 28 November 2004

Franks’ day-glo tangle of an installation is a nightmarish vision of deranged, pop-saturated sixties sculpture and neo-plasticism. At the heart of it stands a large egg-head totem, bewigged in blue-flocked carved Styrofoam and wispy extrusions. The central figure bays, with a single, glitter-bejewelled, geometric eye, like an crazed cross between Zebedee and a Flowerpot Man. As with the rest of Franks’ sculptural practice the result is the product of an alliance between mainstream and underground American animation/cartoons and a conventional, historical-sculptural vocabulary. Franks draws on Bernini and the ‘New Generation’ of British 60’s sculptors fusing an eclectic language of mass produced factory materials and satirical cartoon imagery.

For this new work, Franks has drawn heavily on the 1980’s underground comic ‘Raw’. The bright colours, geometry and general optimism of the 60’s ‘Tra-la-la’ generation contrasts sharply with the faint grotesqueness and fluorescent, abject absurdity of the 80’s comic and social zeitgeist of that time. In many ways the work could be read as the most political Franks has made to date, stepping out of a hermetic visual dialogue and into the bright lights of social discourse. Franks isn’t a political artist though what comes through is something tasteless but selective, well crafted but amateurish.

Matt Franks has had solo exhibitions at Art Now, Tate Britain 2002, te tuhi Gallery, Auckland 2002 and Asprey Jacques, London 2002. In January 2004 he was artist in residence in Kenya. Group shows include Into My World, The Aldrich, Connecticut 2004, My Way, Galerie Fernand Leger, Paris 2003 and Tailsliding, British Council touring 2001.