Natalie Frank

🔳Natalie Frank is an American artist. 

Her work deals with themes of power, sexuality, gender, feminism, and identity. Although Frank is best known as a painter, she has also explored other mediums including sculpture and drawing. Her most famous works are a series of drawings of the original, unsanitized Brothers Grimm fairy tales.

Frank's work is marked by disturbing, explicit, and grotesque subject matter that revolves around themes including women, sexuality, gender, violence, and humanity. She often blurs the line between reality and fantasy, and the artist notes that she wants her work to be located on the edge of Magical Realism and the real world, the former in literature being a major source of inspiration for Frank. 

With oil on canvas and mixed media making up the bulk of her work, Frank is praised for her classical techniques that illicit references to the fleshy figures of Francis Bacon. Artists who she credits as inspirations include Edgar Degas, Diego Velazquez, Kathe Kollwitz, Francisco Goya, and Robert Gober.

Frank refers to the series as "drawings" instead of "illustrations" to demonstrate her interpretation of the series through a feminist lens.

To accentuate the dark nature of the tales, Frank uses bright, often neon colors. Instead of working from life, Frank uses photographs of models that often include family and friends—a portrait of her father appears in "All Fur," and her grandfather's face floats next to the headless body of Bluebeard is one of the series' drawings.

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