Best of Nudity: Frank Mesaric

For Frank Mesaric, translating the power of the human form has been a lifelong project. It all began, quite poetically, with Michelangelo. The beauty and power of his anatomical accuracy captivated Frank and started him on a lifelong obsession with the power and possibility of the nude as a subject. Working in oil paints, Frank’s work is layered with complex and unsettling narratives born from the diasporic nature of his upbringing as a child of Slovenian migrants. Today, he takes his cues from his Gippsland Victoria surroundings, where the power generation industry has scarred the landscape with industrial machinery. His compositions are likewise disjointed, obscuring certain elements and placing nude bodies in foreign and often destructive scenes. “I am an avid collector of images,” tells Frank. “From magazines, newspapers, old books, the internet as well as my own photographs. I use this material as starting points or supports for my ideas.” The sepia and painterly quality of his works mute the scenes he translates so that bodies become alienated amidst ghostly landscapes of decay. With this uncompromising rawness in subject and technique, Frank’s works arouse a sense of disquiet within us, as if man and machine are more closely aligned than we thought.

Feature image: Frank Mesaric, Syria and Two Figures. Oil on canvas, 150 x 120cm. Courtesy: the artist