1930 - 1993

Sculptor. Born in Thurlow, Suffolk, daughter of a Brigadier and one time polo-player, she studied at Guildford School of Art (1947--9) and at Chelsea School of Art (1949--53), under Bernard Meadows and Willi Soukop, making her first visit to France in 1951. The Tate Gallery acquired her Bird, when it was exhibited at the Beaux Arts Gallery in 1952, and she won a prize for her entry to the ICA’s competition for the Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner in 1953. Frink was preoccupied throughout her career with the male figure and with positive and negative aspects of masculinity, and also with animals. Aggression, endurance and suffering are the pervading themes of her early work. Later, in the 1960s her male figures and heads assume grotesque and machistic features. However, after her second marriage and removal to Southern France in 1967, her representations of men grew more affirmative. From 1954 to 1962, Frink had taught at St Martin’s School of Art, but found herself increasingly at odds with the emergent vogue for welded abstract sculpture, and also with the ethos of Pop Art. Her first public commissions had come in 1957: a Wild Boar for Harlow New Town, and a Blind Beggar and Dog for an estate in Bethnal Green. Many more were to follow, the last being a figure of Christ for the Anglican Cathedral in Liverpool, which was completed in the year of her death. Her last years were spent in Woolland in Dorset. In 1982 she was made a Dame of the British Empire. Frink’s preferred sculptural technique involved modelling directly in plaster and then modifying the work with carving tools. After 1988, she was inspired by the newly discovered Riace Warriors to add colour to her work.