Despite being one of Aotearoa's most celebrated artists, Dick Frizzell (b.1943, Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau) has often slipped through the nets of traditional critical definition. In fact, the success of his career is, in part, due to the dramatic diversions he has made between different styles and genres.
Frizzell studied at Ilam School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury in the 1960s. Before becoming a full-time painter in 1995, Frizzell worked in advertising as an animator, commercial artist and illustrator, and as a result has no qualms about blurring categories, with paintings often a pastiche of images drawing on modern art and graphic design.
Frizzell’s work has always been characterised by a highly skilled handling of paint and an endlessly inventive range of subject matter and styles: faux-naive New Zealand landscapes, figurative still-life, comic book characters, and witty parodies of modernist abstraction. His taste is conveniently broad, and he has a penchant for fondly remembered and well-worn clichés. His work also portrays a sense of exuberance, ironic humour, and nostalgia. An anti-traditionalist, Frizzell makes a deliberate effort to subvert the hierarchies of 'high' and 'low' art - poking fun the existential angst of much New Zealand painting in the art culture of his youth.
Frizzell’s work is held in public collections, including Christchurch Art Gallery, The Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery and Te Papa Museum of New Zealand. Frizzell was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to the arts in the 2004 Queen's Birthday Honours. Exhibition highlights include the major travelling retrospective Dick Frizzell: Portrait of a Serious Artiste (1997) and his residency in Antarctica as part of the Invitational Artist Programme (2005). Frizzell has also published numerous books including the monograph Dick Frizzell: The Painter (2009); It’s All About the Image (2011); and Me, According to the History of Art (2020).
Although primarily a painter, Frizzell also produces an extensive range of works on paper including lithographs and screen prints.