Nadja Frank works in the space between painting, sculpture and the architectural environment. The work in her new exhibition, Rock Shop, originated during the artist’s travels across the United States, and focuses on unpopulated areas of the High Desert. Traveling is an important part of her process, as her works maintain a dialogue with the outside world. The relationship between indoor and outdoor, free and enclosed, natural and studio space, is central to Frank’s practice. This produces a tension in the works between their natural and imaginative features, requiring viewers to ask a question about their true source. Her work explores how we experience landscape: visually by moving in time and space, in our interior imaginations, and through ubiquitous images.

Rock Shop displays a series of new paintings alongside of a large-scale sculptural intervention in the gallery space. Each painting is made of a specific sample of earth, found and collected by the artist during her recent travels. By making paintings, the artist is revisiting her earlier practice, paralleling the space’s regression to nature as it is subsumed by prehistoric materials and forms. The second part of the exhibition is a large scale installation, the Rock. Although the sculpture reaches toward a single peak, it is divided into four parts. The viewer is encouraged to walk into the interior world of the Rock and to experience the many images it presents. Set on casters, the pieces of the Rock move, encouraging a spirit of playfulness while engendering a sense of the shifts in geological time.

Nadja Frank was born in 1980 in Lohr am Main, Germany, and lives in New York City.  Frank received her Diploma in Fine Arts with Honors from Hochschule fur bildende Künste in Hamburg, Germany in 2008, and her M.F.A. from Columbia University. She has exhibited internationally in solo exhibitions at 401contemporary Berlin/London (Berlin), Margini Arte Contemporanea (Massa, Italy), Galerie Conradi (Hamburg), and in group exhibitions at Kunst und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Bonn), Kunstverein Hamburg, Kolbe Museum (Berlin), Chelsea Art Museum (New York), and Socrates Sculpture Park (New York).