Edvard Frank

With Edvard Frank, the mpk rediscovers a painter whose color-intensive visual language has an expressive, timeless presence. Spontaneous and diverse in his working methods, the artist is able to perceive and capture his world of motifs in an extremely subtle way. Characteristic of his work, which moves between figuration and abstraction, is a lively interplay of color, space and light. In 1955, on the occasion of the reopening of the mpk after the Second World War, he created the mural “Handwerk und Technik” – as art-in-architekture. Since the mid-1980s, the work had been hidden behind a screened wall and can now be admired again on the occasion of the 150th anniversary.

Particularly the colors red, blue and yellow painting carried out in secco (painted on dried plaster), shine in their luminous power and lend the room a new effect.

Eight watercolor studies from the mpk’s collection complete the presentation. Edvard Frank, who explored antiquity in his art, described himself as a “secret classicist” during the creative phase of the 1940s and 1950s. During the period of non-objective art, the Informel, he deliberately never took the step into complete abstraction.

Edvard Frank belongs to the so-called Lost Generation, a generation of artists in Germany born between 1890 and 1914. Frank was born in 1909 in Korschenbroich, North Rhine-Westphalia, and began his training in 1926 at the School of Crafts and Arts and Crafts in Trier, then attended the Werkkunstschule in Cologne and subsequently studied at the Academy of Fine Arts under Carl Hofer. A study visit to Rome followed in 1934/35.

His artistic development was abruptly interrupted by National Socialism and the Second World War. His studios in Dillingen/Saar and in Berlin fall victim to the flames. In 1946, Frank is one of the founding members of the Palatinate Secession, a member of the New Darmstadt Secession and a member of the German Artists’ Association. In 1961, he was awarded the Rhineland-Palatinate State Prize and in 1970 the Albert Weisgerber Prize for Fine Arts. Edvard Frank dies in Saarlouis at the age of 62. He is posthumously awarded the Heidelberg Willibald Kramm Prize.