bear—looking behind

Die große Expeditionskünstlerin

FRANEK (b. 1939 in Potsdam; lives and works in Berlin and Radegast) is a painter, draftswoman, and graphic artist as well as explorer. Sculptures, photographs, films, and autobiographical notes round out her oeuvre. After completing her studies at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Berlin FRANEK spent much of the 1970s and 1980s immersing herself in the cultures of pre-Colombian America, working in Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras. She assisted the mathematician Maria Reiche in surveying the enormous spiral-shaped geoglyphs in the Nazca Desert in Peru and recorded the rituals of the Sioux on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota for the Übersee-Museum, Bremen. FRANEK gathered archetypal and archaic tokens that have been in use for millennia in extra-European cultures. As she painted and catalogued them, her work evolved into something very different from what is usually expected of visual artists. She discovered signifiers and made her own marks.

This first book on FRANEK’s work between 1960 and 1990 focuses on projects in foreign cultures and attempts to determine their impact on an oeuvre as it grew over three decades. With observations on the various series by Jörn Merkert, Lothar Romain, Eberhard Roters, Lucie Schauer, Wieland Schmied, Heinz Thiel, Fred Thieler, Elisabeth Voigtländer, and others.