Frank Hinder, Bomber Crash 1943, tempera on paper on pulpboard , 54.9 x 40 cm
Collection AGNSW, © Estate of Frank Hinder

A VISUAL LANGUAGE FOR THE 20th CENTURY

Frank Hinder’s life spanned the 20th century, 1906 - 1992. He was born in the revolutionary decade in which Marinetti announced in 1909 - “Destroy the past!” The call was to make a new art for the 20th century. Cubism, Futurism,Orphism, Abstraction, were all created in this new spirit before the first world war.

James Gleeson was questioning, with Freud and Jung, the reasonableness of ‘reason’ - creating a Dionysian surrealist language for the century of Kafka, Hitler etc, the never-ending list. Hinder forged an opposite Apollonian language, believing reason led to order and order hopefully to beauty. Hinder projects his vision of luminosity onto the universe.

His language expressed the interconnectedness of everything. Naturalism, Semi-abstraction, Abstraction were all aspects needed for an inclusive world view. He believed art could get as close as science and philosophy to the unreal ‘real’ behind the looking glass of appearances. It has been a paradox of abstraction that it is closer to that ‘real’ than realism.

It comes into this business of design and the relationships and the rhythms, and if you can link into the actual so-called life rhythm in your work then I think you are getting a little bit closer to the universal, whatever it is, that makes us tick. It always fascinates me that you can stand in a room and you can tune in to any damn place on earth if you have got the right set inside you. In other words, we are filled with radio waves and god knows what not. And so it’s the relationship and the sensation in the connection of everything…and a relationship not only to the things around us, but to the things outside and then on to the universe and inter-stellar space and gosh knows what. It’s the rhythm and the apparent laws that make these things work. And I think that’s what we are trying to express in a very feeble sort of way. Frank Hinder

Two of his favourite expressions were I don’t know and It’s all words.

This website is a showcase of Frank Hinder's art in its themes and variations, with a searchable catalogue of many of the artist's works produced over nearly 80 years. Lithographs, not included, are under separate research by Bloomfield Galleries.

THE ART OF FRANK HINDER
by Renee Free & John Henshaw with Frank Hinder has been published by Phillip Mathews Book Publishers, Sydney 2011

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THE SCULPTURE OF MARGEL HINDER
by Ian Cornford

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