Man in the Water
Man in the Water, 1987, Lithograph
Mary Frank (English, born 1933)
#2013.0001.0404
Mary Frank is a contemporary artist who works in many mediums, including painting, printmaking, sculpture, and ceramics. Her work often indirectly approaches topics of memory and loss, with themes drawn from history and myth. Frank was born in England but moved to New York in 1940. In the 1950s, she studied drawing with German painter Max Beckmann at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and with Hans Hoffman at his Greenwich Village studio in New York. Combining abstract shapes with figurative elements, Frank’s work often conveys a powerful range of emotions from grief and sorrow to love and ecstasy. In her two-dimensional work, figures float in undefined spaces, suggesting a sense of timelessness or bodies without place. Although fluent in many mediums, the artist creates work that shares a sense of belonging to the same world.
