9th of February - (extended until) 3rd of May 2008
Gallery4allarts opened a new exhibition to celebrate Liverpool's Capital of Culture year:
'Fanchon Fröhlich – retrospective exhibition'
Paintings, etchings, drawings, philosophical writings and "Creative Phenomena"
@The Grange, 36 Ullet Road, Liverpool, L17 3BP
Press release. Please, click here to read printable version.
Read Jeremy Reed's "Neural Supernovae" about Fanchon Fröhlich.
Private view: 9th February, 4.00-8.30pm accompanied by live music from 'FRAKTURE'
Curator: Nicole Bartos
Venue: The Grange, 36 Ullet Road, Liverpool L17 3BP
Open: Monday to Saturday
2pm-6pm or by appointment.
Contact: nbartos@gmail.com or 07756912911
Many thanks to: The Grange, Jeremy Reed, Frakture, artinliverpool.com
"Neural Supernovae"- by Jeremy Reed
"Fanchon Fröhlich’s paintings are essentially neural, in that
their explosive delivery of colour maps out work that takes its direction from
inner landscapes given the form of abstract configuration. With a background
in linguistic philosophy and science, Fanchon began painting at the Liverpool
College of Art, largely as a figurative artist, before her seminal involvement
with the etcher S.W. Hayter’s Atelier 17 in Paris, an experience that radically
challenged her formative experiments with figurative painting, and transformed
her into the liberated proponent of abstract expressionism who we know today.
Only a small number of Fanchon’s early works have survived, but amongst
them is the achingly sensitive portrait of her late husband, the physicist, Herbert
Frohlich, shown here, as a superb example of her ability to bring the complex
inner thinker to light, so that we the viewer are confronted directly with the
man’s characteristic preoccupation with thought processes, as his means
of connecting with the quantum universe by way of physics.
Part of Fanchon’s greatness lies in her ability to continually reinvent
herself as an artist. Her writings on philosophy, science and art, her immense
European culture, that also takes in the work of the American abstract expressionists,
as well as the Japanese influences on her art, initiated by a period of work
with Goto San in Kyoto, have all combined over the years, to the continuous
and lively remaking of her art as the dominant expression of a life committed
to imaginative creativity.
In 1991, Fanchon always in search of the new founded the Collective Phenomena,
an art movement characterised by having several painters working abstractly
together on a surface that takes its force from concentrated spontaneity within
the participants, the activity often being performed live to the accompaniment
of Lawrence Ball’s extempore piano music. The work of the Collective
Phenomena, beautiful, disturbing, powerfully conflicting and neurologically
menacing, is integral to the provocatively challenging retrospective of an
artist at last coming up for serious consideration as a major painter.
Fanchon’s connections to Liverpool too, as the concealed city buried
in the subtext to her art, forms another important aspect of her creative growth
as an artist, right from her early years of studying at the Liverpool College
of Art, to assimilating the city’s indigenous culture into the textural
density of her work as place, no matter how abstractly overwritten. Her work,
always celebratory in tone and driving in energy, is the unstoppable example
of an artist working with courage at the edge, and one who is prepared to accept
all experience as subject matter for art, and to compound the risks proposed
by pioneering into adventurous experimentation. I would point for example to
the painting Visual Music V11 Lyrical Moon, a collaboration between Fanchon
and Sylvie Le Seac’h, as a superb instance of the collective method,
in which intense colour mixed with acute sensory experience, come together
as the fusion of energies instrumental to creating a spontaneous work of visionary
intensity. But for all Fanchon’s education in philosophic and scientific
disciplines, the work is never prohibitively cerebral, but always moves seamlessly
from mental conception to imaginative expression without trace of interruption.
Almost entirely conceived in Liverpool, in a studio with aerospace-silver walls,
high up in her old 19th century house on Greenheys Road, Fanchon Fröhlich
who works in a light peculiar to her adopted city, has produced a highly original
body of work, edgy, impacting, colourful, energised, and totally, unapologetically
the real thing." Jeremy
Reed
Read review written by the artinliverpool.com:
"Fanchon Frohlich
at the Grange
An excellent retrospective of 5 decades of work by Fanchon Frohlich opened
at The Grange, Ullet Road on Saturday. Fanchon was there of course, looking
as elegant and arty as ever. Music by Frakture with whom she collaborated at
Cornerstone last year and the gallery proprietor and curator Nicole Bartos
read a lovely statement about the artist written by the poet, Jeremy Reed.
As well as several abstract paintings there are charcoal drawings, etchings,
masses of sketch books, philosophical writings and my own favourite piece,
I think, is her portrait of her late husband Herbert who for many years was
Professor of Theoretical Physics at Liverpool University.
The following text is from her website...
Fanchon Fröhlich (nee Angst) was a philosophy student at the University
of Chicago, where she worked with Rudolf Carnap (formerly of Vienna, and the
founder of the Vienna Circle) and Oxford where she studied with Sir Prof. Peter
Strawson, doing a doctorate in Primary and Secondary Qualities.
She studied at Liverpool College of Art, then moved to St Ives to work with
Peter Lanyon. Later she travelled to Paris where she worked with the sculptor
Szabo and finally studied at Stanley William Hayter’s etching atelier,
Atelier 17, all of the time preserving her faith in Abstract Expressionism.
Fanchon’s artwork unites philosophy of science and art, evident for instance
in the ‘Position of Light in Art’ and the ‘Paradoxes of Abstract
Expressionism and Pop Art’ to the book she co-edited with Sylvie Le Seac'h
(who was also a pupil of Hayter): ‘S.W. Hayter Research on Experimental
Drawing: Systems of Oscillating Fields‘.
Fanchon has produced both representational paintings - among which is the portrait
of her husband to be displayed in the Royal Society (for Scientists) in London
- and abstract expressionist paintings, etchings, and more recently ‘Collective
Phenomena’.
’ Collective Phenomena’ is the name for a group of abstract artists
painting collectively on the same surface, using the gestures of one then another
as inspiration and results (in some cases) to a unusual counterpoint.
Viewing 2-6pm, Monday to Saturday or by appointment. Exhibition runs until
April 12. 2008.
http://www.gallery4allarts.com/exhibitions.htm"(artinliverpool.com)
Photographs above copyrighted to Nicole Bartos and Minako Jackson
See Fanchon Frohlich photo album with some selections from the opening and exhibiton. More images will follow soon.