Zoey Frank: Summer Paintings

Summer Paintings was Zoey Frank's first solo exhibition with Sugarlift: new work about the warmth, nostalgia, community and abundance of the season, feelings that were especially longed for in 2021. Two monumental canvases anchored the show. Pool Party, nine and a half feet tall, and After the Pool, eleven feet wide, fill a summer day at the pool with extended families, in lively tableaus that show off Frank's hallmark handling of perspective.

Frank breaks each scene into shifting patches of pattern and paint handling, which the painter and critic Daniel Maidman, writing in Whitehot Magazine, read as a picture of how memory works. Around the two large canvases hung Grapevine, a vine-covered fence painted across a grid of panels more than twelve feet wide, interiors such as Window at Night and Washer/Dryer, and scenes from her Berlin Windows. The circular breeze-block pattern from After the Pool was carried onto one gallery wall, and her sculpture Girl with Inflatable Dolphin stood in the middle of the room.

In a statement on the series, Frank wrote, "Now, in the midst of the pandemic, these images read very differently than when I began them. They remind us of an ease in being together that we no longer have access to." Born in 1987 and based in Colorado, she earned her MFA at Laguna College of Art and Design after four years of study with Juliette Aristides at Gage Academy of Art. The exhibition opened on May 27, 2021, and was extended through July 31. The gallery was full on opening night, and the artist was there to talk with visitors. Frank returned to Sugarlift in 2022 with Recent Paintings.