The Estate of Heinz Frank

Heinz Frank (1939–2020) was within the Viennese art scene, the grand master of the play of language and forms through which he – in his perambulation through the locales of the city, and clad in his idiosyncratic, dandyesque attire – pitted a radical form of subjectivity against the conventions of the present day. Each of his exhibitions formed a stage for the performance of a drama that was usually enacted by paintings, sculptures, objects, items of furniture, masks, carpets, and rocks, as well as found objects, one whose protagonists were (for example) “nothingness, the immensity of the hole, the circle whose center pledges its loyalty.” Wordplays are an essential element of Frank’s oeuvre. Using “whichever paper,” Frank notated his ideas in micropoems and aphorisms, which resemble haikus. He used pencils because they are “erasable, then the texts can come back when needed.” These texts were the beginning and the end of every work, a process of thought and its visualisation by the means of objects.