Frank Mann is a New York artist whose Oculus series has been honored with awards in both Venice and Florence, Italy

NEW YORK, NY, June 30, 2019 /Neptune100/ — Frank Mann is a New York artist whose Oculus series has been honored with awards in both Venice and Florence, Italy and whose work is included in Personal Structures, a European Cultural Centre Event of this year’s Venice Biennale. His highly original iconography explores inner and outer vision and is a unique meditation on the eye’s movement and the act of seeing. Works from the Oculus series were awarded the Botticelli Prize in 2014. His career spans decades and these paintings, like Botticelli’s, are unified, varied and highly expressive.

The mastery of technique and the universality of his iconography may cause you to wonder if Mann might have assisted Botticelli, painting the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel alongside him, if he had lived in that period.

Mann, a painter and graphic artist, is a recipient of numerous other awards and grants. He has exhibited in the United States and Europe, specifically in New York, Amsterdam, London, Florence and Berlin, as well as South America and Asia and has received critical acclaim in all these places.

Paintings from the Oculus series continue to evolve with orb-like structures reminiscent of the early abstractionist Frantisek Kupka, that depict the flow of life. In doing so he creates leaps of consciousness that can be compared to those of post-modernist John Ashbery poetical works such as Can You Hear Bird and Flow Chart.

Like Ashbery, Mann derives some of his content from dream imagery, rich in allusions. His paintings depict the outer and inner eye at work, evoking open fields of possibility, such as planets rushing across the Milky Way. Thus Mann exercises freedom and control simultaneously and gives the sense of an oculus or an opening penetrated by natural light.

Speaking to Mann in his sun-lit studio in Manhattan you are surrounded by these vibrant chromatic elocutions which expand the boundaries between abstract and representational art. You can also experience the fusion of outer configurations and psychic states and a frequent disjunctiveness between two and three dimensions.

Therefore what he presents is open-ended and allows the viewer to fill the palette with his or her own interpretations. And like all of us, Mann and Oculus continue to evolve.

Personal Structures
Palazzo Bembo
Riva del Carbon, San Marco 4793
30124 Venice
May 11th to November 26th, 2019