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Dick Frizzell
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About Dick Frizzell
Frizzells work is characterised by a highly skilled handling of paint and an endlessly inventive range of subject matter and styles: faux-naive New Zealand landscapes, figurative still-lifes, comic book characters and witty parodies of modernist abstraction.
His taste is conveniently broad and he has a penchant for fondly remembered and well-worn clichés.
There is also in his work a sense of exuberance, ironic humour and a baby-boomer nostalgia.
An anti-traditionalist, Frizzell often makes a deliberate effort to mix up the categories of high and low art - poking fun at the intellectualisation of 'high art' and the existential angst of much New Zealand painting in the art culture of his youth.
Frizzell's background in advertising has often informed his work as an artist.
He has worked as an animator, commercial artist and illustrator and has no qualms about blurring the categories between his commercial work and art.
His paintings are often a pastiche of images drawing on modern art and graphic design.
The first of his series to gain recognition was based on the colourful labels that appeared on cans of fish.
It was their very ordinariness and the straightforward presentation of these labels that attracted Frizzell. They had all the elements he wanted in his art: bright colours, formal lettering and a one-shot image of the product.
In his attachment to advertising he can be thought of as following in the tradition of artists such as Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol.
In 1997 a retrospective exhibition of his work, Dick Frizzell: Portrait of a Serious Artiste, toured nationally to the major public art galleries of New Zealand, and was accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue.
He has also completed numerous commissions including works for Sky City Casino (Auckland) and the painting of an Ansett New Zealand aeroplane for Starship Children's Hospital.
Frizzell’s works are held in all of the major public and corporate collections throughout New Zealand. Read a book review of The Painter by Dick Frizzell here »
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