about & cv

So begins photo-historian and curator Katherine Ware, introducing Frank Rodick’s work in the book Labyrinth of Desire. She goes on:

A medium recognized for its excellence in recording surfaces, photography is a challenging tool for plumbing the recesses of the brain. However, because it so easily creates a mirror world, a place parallel to our own, photography is also adroit at recontextualizing recognizable subjects to create new meanings. Rodick exploits this paradox and, as his career progresses, continues to use techniques that sever images from conventional interpretation, pushing viewers to engage with them in a less straightforward manner.”

Over his career, Frank Rodick has created images using tools from traditional photography, alternative darkroom techniques, Polaroid technology, video, and digital imaging. Reinventing and applying these methods in multiple configurations, he has created works ranging from the cityscapes of Liquid City and the desolate faces and bodies of Faithless Grottoes all the way to his recent explorations in what might loosely be called the portrait genre. The vein running through these collections of imagery is Rodick’s evolving but abiding obsession with what goes on inside us— those mysteries and convolutions of our internal lives and intimate relationships.

Rodick’s work includes: the forty images of Liquid City; the studies of nude form in sub rosa, later reworked as Masquerade; the Arena pictures and Faithless Grottoes, both founded in video; two series of small scale works installed in wooden cases entitled Revisitations and I live there now; the expressionistic portraits based on the life and death of his parents, Frances and Joseph; and several series of self-portraits, including everything will be forgotten, season of mists, and untitled selves. In 2021, he released his latest work, 25 images collectively titled The Moons of Saturn, which was named the overall winner of the 2021 Pollux Awards.

Over eighty exhibitions, including more than 35 solo shows, have featured Frank Rodick's work, which has also been published in numerous magazines, journals, and books. Museums and other public institutions across the world have acquired his work for their permanent collections. These include the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University; the  Brandts Museum (Denmark); the Brooklyn Museum; the Fort Wayne Museum of Art (United States); the Franklin Rawson Provincial Museum of Fine Arts (Argentina);  the Fundación Luz Astral, Buenos Aires; the Kinsey Institute Collection; Lehigh University Art Galleries; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Salta (Argentina); the Museum of Photography at Charleroi (Belgium); the National Fine Arts Museum of Buenos Aires; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the National Gallery of Canada; the New Mexico Museum of Modern Art; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Individual collectors in North America, Europe, Latin America, and Asia have acquired his pictures for their private collections. 

Frank Rodick has travelled to four continents to lecture on his work as well as to lead workshops where, drawing on his extensive education and experience as a practicing psychotherapist and teacher, he focuses on helping other artists and students in all media enhance their personal creative process and vision.

See also Frank Rodick’s list of fourteen things he wishes he’d been able to tell his younger self.