Frank Piatek

Frank Piatek (born 1944) is an American artist, known for abstract, illusionistic paintings of tubular forms and three-dimensional works exploring spirituality, cultural memory and the creative process.

[15][16] Curator Lynne Warren describes Piatek as "the quintessential Chicago artist—a highly individualistic, introspective outsider" who has developed a "unique and deeply felt world view from an artistically isolated vantage point.

[6][29][30] They categorize his art into two bodies: more widely known images of intertwined, tubular forms; and primal works of sculpture, collage and installation that reveal his inner thoughts and creative process.

[29][33][32][34] Gedo and Yood have written that Piatek's work hovers between abstraction and figuration, providing a screen to stage open-ended, "sensuous and seductive dramas"[29] alluding to biology, sexuality, machine elements, and spirituality.

[41][42][43][36] They further characterize this work as featuring forceful drawing and rhythmical design that suggests coiled energy, subtle wet-on-wet modeling, cross-hatched brushwork and active surfaces, luminous color, and glowing ethereal light.

[44][35][1] Piatek developed his second body of introverted, shamanistic work in the early 1970s, during a time of personal and artistic crisis; writers identify key its themes as death and rebirth, macrocosm and microcosm, myth and the collective unconscious.

[49][31][48] Franz Schulze called the carvings persuasive, "fetishistic objects … sinister, private things, like effigies, full of atavistic implications;"[49] Derek Guthrie, however, found the primitive approach less convincing and over-intellectualized.

[51][52][10] They coined the label "Allusive Abstraction" for their approach, eventually promoting their ideas through Chicago Art Write, an artist-written publication co-edited by Piatek, Conger and Loving.

[1] Critics such as Alan Artner and Christopher Lyon identified a greater sense of eroticism in the work, alternately comparing it to the fleshy ruddiness of Rubens, the odalisques of Ingres, and musculature of Michelangelo.

[5][32][64] Critics such as Alan Artner and Andy Argy described these combinations of mixed-media, layered marks and processes as among his most elaborate works—dark, distilled stream-of-conscious pictorial diaries engaging genealogies of cultural history that reveal the sensibilities and interplay of abstraction and figuration underlying his paintings.

[18][65][66] Almost Voyage Time/Traveler’s Report (2008) was an altar-like installation of two boat/pod forms from which paper tags marked with drawing, symbols and text fragments hung, suggesting a gathering of material for transformation.

[21] The installations Kerux Aion (2007–8) and Theater of the Concealed Index (2014) continued Piatek's emphasis on text and the act of mark-making, combining drawings of words with myriad tags or pieces of cut paper that were marked and painted, often with iconic symbols or patterns, and hung in rows by twine.

Frank Piatek, Untitled , oil on canvas, 1967.
Frank Piatek, Untitled (small X painting) , acrylic on canvas, 24" x 23.5", 1967.
Frank Piatek, N.A.M.E. Gallery installation, mixed media, 1975.
Frank Piatek, Glowing Forms , oil alkyd on canvas, 62" x 72", 1984.
Frank Piatek, Untitled (collage) , acrylic photocopy transfer, 1994.