Dora Frost
Statement
For the last three decades, Dora Frost has created paintings, collages, and installations, born of literary imagery and nineteenth and twentieth-century romanticism. Frost has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions and can be found in the collections of major collectors of the Twentieth century. She takes the subject matter from Marcel Proust to Freddie Mercury and infuses it with her own twist producing a fanciful and magical world.
Since 1978 Dora Frost has exhibited paintings and works on paper and invented new ways of utilizing traditional pictorial mediums and materials to create exciting three-dimensional installations.
In response to a recent question about the aesthetic underpinnings of her approach, Frost, who was born in Manhattan in 1951 and studied at the Parsons School of Design in New York from 1969 to 1973, speaks about her passion for art-making as "an inquiry into the nature of reality". Based in recurring interests in "illustration of the written word or of interior kingdoms" and "painting and drawing from life," according to Frost, she has produced "two very different types of work”.
One type of work highlighting the powers of imagination, fantasy and memory are strikingly showcased in the series inspired by a rereading of Marcel Proust’s great novel In Search of Lost Time also known as Remembrances of Things Past. Frost envisions the series as an installation. Like the seven volumes of Proust, Frost's series-installation is lengthy and episodic bringing together content taken from the novel and incidents in some way commenting on that content taken from the artist's own experience. It consists of hundreds of variously sized canvases of various sizes with some put together into 'collaged formats'; others she lets stand alone.