Frank Badur

The painter and draftsman Frank Badur is a master of quiet art and of delicate nuances. His sensitive attentiveness is focused less on the phenomena of the world of objects than on the phenomenal possibilities of art itself. His drawings appear to have emerged from the graph paper; his paintings, from a special sense for tone colors and contrasts. If one wanted to scout about in art historical categories for his work, one would stumble on sources in Concrete painting and in Constructivism as well as in influences from color field painting and minimalist art.

Frank Badur’s palette is indeed minimalist—frequently he employs just two colors in a painting, composed in color fields, placed in tension, and counterbalanced to each other. This results in an interaction in which the colors and their weights support, influence, and topple one another, thus liberating phenomena that trust only the possibilities of artistic concretion and construction.

In his works on paper, Frank Badur usually works out compositions based on a grid or along with coordinates. But this apparent rigor inevitably recedes into the background as soon as a form or color emerges. That is true of the individual drawings as well as of the series of sheets in which Frank Badur produces variations on a theme: “without predetermined objective,” as Badur puts it, since “they carry their meaning within themselves.”