THE MISSION PROJECTS presents an Artist Focus featuring Chicago-based painter Jean Alexander Frater entitled Wee Restless Hours. Alexander Frater experiments with materials inherent to painting and integrates other histories, traditions, and languages to build upon what is considered traditional painting and allow the materiality of the work to retain its voice. This presentation will include a series of recent works that push the limits of containment, where figures dissolve into landscapes and painting extends into sculpture. Color, form, and material gesture toward both repose and restlessness — figures sink into themselves even as they swell beyond the frame.
Originating within the tradition of Color Field abstraction, Alexander Frater’s new paintings begin as lush expanses of pigment that fill oversized canvases and envelop architectural space. The depicted figures are abstractions, oscillating between representations of natural elements — mountains, flowers — and bodies that recall the distorted nature of Picasso’s figures. Alexander Frater’s figures are not pursued in a desirous frenzy but instead recline, stretching inward in repose, restlessness, or abandon, yet the surfaces do not remain undisturbed. The painted canvases are torn, wrapped, layered, and rebuilt, transforming the color field into a fragmented, scaled-down image — each piece reduced to approximately one-third of its original size. This shift creates an intimate, textured presence and a scale that invites proximity and touch. Paradoxically, the torn strips of canvas provide an uninterrupted visual path for forms to stretch beyond the frame. These extensions bulge beyond the rectangular containment, dangling, hanging, or at times framing the painting itself, further dissolving the boundaries between figure and ground, image and object, confinement and expansion.
Jean Alexander Frater (b. 1972) received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Dayton, Ohio. Her work has been exhibited internationally and nationally in venues such as GAVLAK (Los Angeles, CA); The Franklin (Chicago, IL); Transmitter (Brooklyn, NY); Chicago Artists Coalition (Chicago, IL); Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, OH); Rockford Art Museum (Rockford, IL); El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe (Santa Fe, NM); and Kulturhuset (Stockholm), among others. She has recently exhibited solo exhibitions at Hidell Brooks Gallery (Charlotte, NC); ENGAGE Projects (Chicago, IL); and Guest Spot @ The REINSTITUTE (Baltimore, MD). She was a 2017-2018 Chicago Artists BOLT resident. Alexander Frater is the Director of Material, a not-for-profit artist project space.
Installation views of Wee Restless Hours. Photos and Video by Bob. (Robert Chase Heishman + Robert Salazar)
