Natalie Frank, Illustrations for Grimm’s Fairy Tales

Natalie Frank is an American artist currently living and working in New York City.  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. 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 artist Francis Bacon.

In 2011, artist Paulo Rego suggested that Frank read the original, unsanitized versions of the “Brother Grimm Fairy Tales”, noting that the series embodied many of the themes present in Frank’s work. Frank was intrigued, and spent the next three years creating 75 gouache and chalk pastel drawings of 36 of the original stories, including well known tales including ‘Rapunzel’ and ‘Cinderella’, as well as lesser known ones lie ‘The Lettuce Donkey’. The series marks the first time Frank drew inspiration from literature and is one of the only complex, systematic examination of the original tales by a contemporary artist.

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