Amy Bessone, Francesca DiMattio, and Natalie Frank, Salon 94, NY

Pushing the boundaries of painting and sculpture, these three artists are revisionists who turn up the volume. Their bold, utterly singular styles reimagine art history, fairy tales, folklore and popular culture. Shared between them is a common subject matter: the female form, rendered in twisting and torquing dynamism, vivid colors and oozing with attitude. In all three bodies of work, raw brushstrokes and meticulous handwork convey a world of women who oscillate between anxiety and autonomy, aggression and vulnerability, kitsch and class.

For Natalie Frank, drawing and painting are both intimate and expansive. She began her professional career as a figurative painter: large-scale works on canvas portrayed domestic scenes and power dynamics, particularly within sexuality, gender identity, history and religion. She continues to hone a unique practice focusing on feminist tales and fables using vibrantly charged figuration to reveal powerful voices of resistance in iconic literary works. In paper pulp painting, Frank fuses her layered approach to drawing and its intense color with her paintings’ gestural and rendered hand. By pouring, moving, dividing, or combining viscous hand-pigmented paper pulp with brushes, spoons, and sticks, and using it as paint, Frank sculpts intimate portraits of anxious females, some eating their hair, others closing their eyes in anguish or peace. Frank’s approach is painterly, working against the natural tendency of paper pulp to settle, she agitates these surfaces with bravura brushwork. These paper pulp paintings were made at Dieu Donné through their illustrious Sponsorship Program.