Zoey Frank: Recent Paintings

Recent Paintings was Zoey Frank's second solo exhibition with Sugarlift, following Summer Paintings in 2021. Frank, a Colorado-based painter born in 1987, studied for four years with Juliette Aristides at Gage Academy of Art before earning her MFA in painting at Laguna College of Art and Design. Her paintings quote freely from the Old Masters, the Post-Impressionists and the Abstract Expressionists, and she brings that range to everyday subjects: domestic interiors, radiators, a window, musicians at a porch gathering.

The centerpiece was Porch Musicians, a diptych measuring 74 by 132 inches. The two halves read as one scene at first, but they shift on a longer look: children and a violinist appear on the left, a blue sky gives the right side a more naturalistic feel, and the perspective, mood and degree of abstraction change from one panel to the other. In the three Breakfast Table paintings, Frank reduced her palette to capture different scenes at the same table: green with orange highlights as a couple sits down to breakfast, pink with green as they read the paper together, and orange with blue as the woman sits alone.

In the words of Jordan Wolfson, "The complexity of compositional structure comes through, along with the exquisite visual meanderings and slippage, the conflating of abstraction and figuration." The exhibition opened with a celebration at the gallery on October 27, 2022, and remained on view through January 7, 2023.