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The extraordinary Rose Frantzen will be another of the great protagonists of FACE-Fine Art Convention and Expo- 2020, which will be held in Baltimore from October 29th to November 1st, 2020. An all-round artist who has collected numerous coveted awards, including the People’s Choice Award in 2016 and 2018 and the Portrait Society of America Award. Rose Frantzen boasts works in permanent collections scattered throughout the United States of America (including the Butler Institute of American Art) and the publication of her work in the most prestigious American art magazines. She also organizes, from time to time, workshops of variable duration.
Born in Maquoketa, the artist is particularly attached to her city, where she and her parents bought the former town hall of Maquoketa in 1991, transforming the three-storey building dating back to 1901 into a gallery and art studio. Frantzen studied art at the American Academy of Art in Chicago, at the Palette & Chisel Academy with Richard Schmid and at the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts, where she studied artistic anatomy with Deane G. Keller, and then made several painting tours around the world: Australia, Guatemala, Mexico and Russia. In addition to representing landscapes and still lifes, Frantzen is a figurative artist who works on serial and allegorical paintings, mainly oil paintings and sometimes combined in multimedia works. Among the various series she composed, the most ambitious work remains without doubt the one she dedicated to her hometown, Maquoketa, a town of almost 6000 inhabitants located in Jackson County in the state of Iowa. With “Portrait of Maquoketa” Rose Frantzen created a majestic work with which she democratized the concept of portrait.
Usually the portrait is in fact a work made on commission or that in any case represents some personality that particularly cheers the artist. In this regard, Rose Frantzen has represented the deans and presidents of universities, governors and the Secretary of Agriculture of the United States of America, but in “Portrait of Maquoketa” portraiture takes on a value for Rose that goes beyond beauty or the concept of the work itself. Composed of 180 oil portraits, each measuring 12×12″, with this series that took her a year of work, Rose Frantzen wanted to pay homage to the faces of her people and her life: faces of people who voluntarily offered to be portrayed in a window looking out onto Maquoketa’s Main Street. These portraits have become the image of people who characterize the place and inevitably become part of history. To make the homage to her hometown even more intense and understandable to the observer, Frantzen painted the village of Maquoketa on 34 of the 180 panels, hanging from the ceiling and arranged in such a way that when a visitor sits at one end of the installation, all the panels blend into a unified vision of Maquoketa seen from the hills outside the city. Her husband Chuck Morris, also an artist, and Rose’s brother also participated in the installation.
This massive work offered her the privilege of exhibiting at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in 2009/2010, before becoming part of the permanent collection of the Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA. While with Maquoketa’s Portrait of Maquoketa Rose Frantzen consecrated her figure to the history of American art, no less interesting are the artist’s other series, including In the Face of Illusion, with which Rose Frantzen brings figurative portraits and optical illusions into dialogue. The artist deals in this way with themes that lead back to the concept of optical illusion compared to the necessity (or forcing) with which man is forced to remain anchored to pre-packaged labels (optical illusions in fact) in reference to: religion, ethnicity, sex. According to Fratzen, society tends to amalgamate us with each other, homogenizing us by sectors, which no longer allows us to see the unique particularities of each individual.
The installation “In the Face of Illusion” includes not only paintings but also objects and an anamorphic projection of an impossible form. In addition, the Brunnier Art Museum of Iowa State University in Ames, presented “Faces of Iowa State” a project that presented 39 portraits among them: students, faculty, staff, alumni and other members of the university community. This is not the first time Frantzen has received commissions from the State of Iowa: she had already created a series of portraits for the 2016 Iowa State Fair. In the selected work, the brushstrokes emphasize the character making him intensely “alive”, a no small dowry for an artist… as they say: only the gift of the word is missing…
Don’t miss the opportunity to observe her in the making of a portrait from life: all the more reason to participate in FACE 2020.
From the title: Jim in April Sun, Maquoketa series by Rose Fratzen. Oil, 20×20”.
