Frank Egloff
Born 1948, St. Louis, MO, lives and works in Boston, MA
After Deakin, 1952/1957 (Oliver Bernard), 1999, acrylic on canvas, Museum Purchase with partial funds provided by a grant from the Artists’ Resource Trust, a fund of the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, 2000.36
In his large-scale painted portraits, Frank Egloff manipulates and alters the facial features of his subjects. He begins by appropriating culturally significant black and white photographs which he photocopies and cuts and pastes, rearranging and enlarging them before they are projected onto a canvas. By the time he is ready to paint, the artist has so altered the image as to call into question the notion of photographic objectivity. According to the artist, “The paintings are conceived primarily as meditations on the nature and meaning of contemporary images.”
The painting after Deakin 1952/1957 Oliver Bernard comes from a series inspired by the British photographer John Deakin, who took portraits of artists working in London’s Soho district in the 1950s. Egloff transforms a photograph of the poet, Oliver Bernard, so that overlapping images of the man depict him facing both forward and slightly turned, echoing the multiple viewpoints of a Cubist painting. Egloff’s painting was purchased from The 2000 DeCordova Annual Exhibition.
