Natalie Frank

In 2015, the Drawing Center opened an exhibition of twenty-five of the Brothers Grimm drawings, organized by senior curator Claire Gilman, garnering reviews in Artforum, Artinfo, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Interview Magazine, and Vulture, among others. An expanded version of the exhibition opened at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas in July 2015.

Frank refers to the series as "drawings" instead of "illustrations" to demonstrate her interpretation of the series through a feminist lens. To accentuate the dark nature of the tales, Frank uses bright, often neon colors. Instead of working from life, Frank uses photographs of models that often include family and friends—a portrait of her father appears in "All Fur," and her grandfather's face floats next to the headless body of Bluebeard in one of the series' drawings.

In 2013, Frank was diagnosed with a lack of stereoscopic vision—she has limited depth perception and needs corrective lenses, which the artist credits as the inspiration to create 3D figures. Artists, Rembrandt and Pablo Picasso, both had the same eye condition.

In 2011, artist Paula Rego suggested that Frank read the original, unsanitized versions of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, noting that the series embodied many of the themes present in Frank's work. Frank was intrigued, and spent the next three years creating 75 gouache and chalk pastel drawings of 36 of the original stories, including well known tales including Rapunzel and Cinderella, as well as lesser known ones like The Lettuce Donkey. The series marks the first time Frank Drew inspiration from literature and is one of the only complex, systematic examination of the original tales by a contemporary artist.

In 2006, while she was still completing her masters at Columbia, Frank had her first solo show at the Briggs Robinson Gallery; art critic Charlie Finch notes that the gallery's director, Bettina Smith, was looking for an upcoming art world star and curated the resulting show of Frank's work. In 2013, Frank made her West Coast solo show debut at ACME Los Angeles. Titled "The Scene of Disappearance," the show included works depicting home life through intimate and grotesque portraits of bodies set in interior spaces, blurring the line between abstraction and realism. Reoccurring themes in the show included dreams, the subconscious, alienation, and distress. This exhibition also marked the first time Frank worked with collage.

Frank was born in Austin, Texas in 1980. Growing, up Frank enjoyed reading and was very imaginative. At the age of ten, Frank moved from Austin to Dallas where she lived and attended school for the next eight years. Frank was a high school National Merit Finalist, but was denied a place in the National Honor Society due to conflicts with school administrators over her drawings from life. Frank earned her BA in Studio Art from Yale University in 2002, and her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2006. In 2003, Frank earned a Fulbright Scholarship to the National Academy of Fine Art in Oslo, Norway. She has also studied at the L'École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2001, and the Florence Academy of Art in 2000, among others.