Marliz Frencken

Critical text

For about forty years, Marliz Frencken (b. 1955, Panningen) has been moving forward with an extensive body of work consisting of hundreds of small and medium paintings based on found images, as well as sculptures and assemblages built with various found materials. As the early 1980s saw the rise of media power in the economy of images, Frencken appropriated these industrial pictures (ads, magazines, posters, vernacular photography, art history) through painting, as a way to personally take over these materials. Likewise, her sculptures are assemblages made of various found materials from both fine arts (clay, plaster) and everyday consumer objects (packaging, manufactured items, costume jewels). Among other topics, the history of representation of women in visual culture has been constant in her oeuvre, as seen in the series of images appropriated from pornographic magazines in 1989, as well as in the group of Madonna in 1991 depicting breastfeeding women, with a very discreet approach to the medium of painting and the strategies of representation. More recently, from 1999 to the late 2000s, Frencken has focused on subjects from her close environment, family members, interiors, and self-portraits often based on her own photographs.

Text by Balthazar Lovay