Natalie Frank: Unbound

Natalie Frank: Unbound brings together selections from her four major bodies of drawings: Tales of the Brothers Grimm (2011–14), The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (2016), Story of O (2017–18), and Madame d’Aulnoy (2019–20).

Collected between 1812 and 1857, the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, including classics such as “Cinderella,” “Snow White,” and “Rapunzel,” are known and loved by children the world over.

Although gathered and adapted for print by the Brothers Grimm, these narratives initially were conceived of, collected, and shared largely by women. 

Natalie Frank interprets the unsanitized versions of these tales into feminist images that elevate heroines and villainesses to celebrate female agency.

Story of O is an erotic novel published in 1954 under the pseudonym Pauline Réage. With its graphic descriptions of sexual exploration, the text has been praised by many feminists as a celebration of women’s empowerment.

Frank writes, "The sex positive feminist tale of Story of O begins with O’s lover taking her to a chateau, introducing her to a world where she can discover her sexuality and identity." 

"This scene shows O slipping off her panties. Her lover is fragmented; she is wholly rendered. She performs this act for her own thrill, not for him."  

The works in this series are presented against wallpaper produced by Flavor Paper and designed by Marian Bantjes, with drawings by Frank. The full suite of Frank’s Story of O drawings were published by Lucia | Marquand (2018). 

Detail of "Power, My Dear" wallpaper (from the Fempower collection by Flavorpaper), from original design by Natalie Frank (American, born 1980) in chalk pastel and gouache. © Natalie Frank. Photo: E. G. Schempf, 2022.

Madame d’Aulnoy was a seventeenth-century French aristocrat who coined the term “fairy tale” (contes de fées) to describe the genre of fiction that she, along with other talented female writers, authored and introduced into literary salons in the 1690s.

Eschewing traditional fairy-tale concepts of dainty princesses with delicate constitutions, d’Aulnoy and her cadre of fairy tellers instead centered their stories on strong heroines.

Frank’s visual contradictions—combinations of abstraction and figuration—parallel d’Aulnoy’s female protagonists, who, by embodying both evil and virtue, present a nuanced understanding of female identity.

This body of artwork is accompanied by the publication The Island of Happiness: Tales of Madame d’Aulnoy (2021), published by Princeton University Press.

In each of her twenty black-and-white gouache-on-paper drawings, she represents a key scene from Jack Zipes’s anthology The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

Alternating between aqueous washes of pigment and thick opaque strokes, she renders her compositions with a freshness and vitality that imbues the centuries-old tales with contemporary relevance.

Frank’s drawings, published by Princeton University Press in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: An Anthology of Magical Tales (2017), are shown in their original form for the first time in this exhibition.

Natalie Frank: Unbound has been organized by Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri and Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin.