Karin Frank

Karin Frank, born 1972 in Vienna. Graphics, sculpture, installation.
She took part in the VSL Futurological Symposium in 2019 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the symposium and created two tall painted wooden steles this week, which focus on the physical work on stone. The works can be seen on the VSL premises.


(*1972), from Perchtoldsdorf, lives and works as a visual artist in Vienna. After training as a graphic designer at the Wiener Grafische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt, she studied under Michelangelo Pistoletto at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She has been taking part in exhibitions since 1997. In 2002, she received the Lower Austrian State Prize for Fine Arts, and in 2004, the Neue Galerie Graz presented her work for the first time in a solo exhibition accompanied by a catalog. In 2005 she was awarded the State Scholarship for Fine Arts.

Frank works sculpturally almost exclusively in wood and paints her works. They are mostly figurative, realistic, but never hyper-realistic. Frank is known for her ability to depict movement in static sculptures. Many of her works show an exaggeration of movement patterns that could be described as lomographic. Recurring elements are the cloud, the bubble and the connection. The exuberant diversity of ideas reflected in her countless sketches is condensed into iconic works that impress with their extraordinary formal language. They are not always free of juvenile content, but they perfectly depict human life in its entirety.

Frank’s works, whether prints, drawings or sculptures, mainly focus on the human body in all its facets; over the years, she has worked on themes such as the environment, excretion, sexuality, love, body positivity, identity, disability, movement and politics in cycles of works. The toy-like appearance of the sculptural works is only seemingly at odds with the unadorned content. Many of the more than 200 sculptures of all sizes created in this way can be found in private and public collections, mainly in German-speaking countries.

Frank’s best-known works: “Ich als ein Kind” (1998) can be found in the collection of the City of Vienna, her signature work “Die Bildhauerin” (2005) in the Artothek des Bundes, numerous other works such as “Schiele” (2005), the “Venuspaar von Willendorf” (2010), “Kontorsionistik” (2013) or the Partnerobjekt (2011) in the collection of the Province of Lower Austria. Her works for public spaces also include the monuments to the mathematician Olga Taussky-Todd and the historian and archaeologist Grete Mostny-Glaser, which can be seen in the Arkadenhof of the University of Vienna.