Frank’s Fearless Exertion

The work of sculptor, painter, and draftswoman Mary Frank has typically been described as poetic and interior, an encrypted iconography with dark intimations of her tumultuous life experiences. In fact, Ms. Frank, from her earliest works in clay to her most recent effort in encaustic, has never lost interest in creating recognizable forms. These archetypal figures — the running horse, the empty boat, and, most important, the human body and face — are all of a common visual language that has traveled to our present-day culture from the world of the ancients and beyond. What’s interesting about their appearance in Ms. Frank’s art is how meaning is conveyed not through narrative, but through the artist’s vigorous making of her art. An exhibition of Ms. Frank’s most recent paintings, and a remarkable collection of more than 50 portrait drawings, is now on view at the DC Moore Gallery. Its title, “The Near Far,” not only references the spatial paradoxes Ms. Frank likes to create in her paintings, but also suggests the complicated emotional terrain of her oeuvre.