15 Facts About Frank Piatek

Frank Piatek was born on 1944 and is an American artist, known for abstract, illusionistic paintings of tubular forms and three-dimensional works exploring spirituality, cultural memory and the creative process.

Frank Piatek's work has been exhibited at institutions including the Whitney Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, MCA Chicago, National Museum, Szczecin in Poland, and Terra Museum of American Art; it belongs to the public art collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and MCA Chicago, among others.

Frank Piatek was raised in the city's ethnic Irving Park neighborhood and began creating art when he attended nearby Lane Technical High School, which bordered the Riverview amusement park; in the 1970s, when he rented a studio across from the park after it closed, its ruins played a role in his work of the time.

Frank Piatek attracted critical attention as an undergraduate, including a 1967 studio visit by Whitney Museum curator John Baur and Hyde Park Art Center director Don Baum that led to his inclusion in the 1968 Whitney Biennial; that same year, he received a Ryerson Travel fellowship from SAIC.

Frank Piatek used the grant to study and travel throughout Europe for a year, filling notebooks with sketches, while developing a sense of the continuity of history that would fuel ideas throughout his career.

In subsequent years, Frank Piatek had solo exhibitions at the Roy Boyd and Richard Gray galleries, and was featured in shows at the MCA Chicago, AIC, Chicago Cultural Center, HPAC, Terra Museum of American Art, and Smart Museum of Art.

Frank Piatek has painted them as twisting, patterned and symmetrical forms that emerge out of dark, packed, enigmatic space; reviewers such as Franz Schulze and Jane Allen described them as evoking close-up magnification of organic, man-made, and symbolic forms.

Frank Piatek developed his second body of introverted, shamanistic work in the early 1970s, during a time of personal and artistic crisis; writers identify key its themes as death and rebirth, macrocosm and microcosm, myth and the collective unconscious.

Frank Piatek was initially inspired by a mural commission that sought a landscape or tree image, leading him to experiment with sinuous, archetypal forms and emblematic hieroglyphs.

Frank Piatek pursued this direction privately in directly referential, symbolic drawings of spiders and trees, artifact-like sculpture, and carvings of snakes, stars, podlike sarcophagi and dead men in boats, covered in mud, twine and fabric.

Several reviews noted the interplay between the primal imagery and contemporary paintings, as well as the insights into Frank Piatek's heretofore hidden process and inspirations.

Frank Piatek has continued to explore this more intimate work in various media and formats throughout his career.

Frank Piatek extended this exploration of the creative process Ii several later installations.

Frank Piatek has taught art for more than four decades, primarily at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Frank Piatek has been awarded National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, and Francis Ryerson Foreign Travel fellowships, as well as the Pauline Palmer Award and John G Curtis Prize from the Art Institute of Chicago, among honors.