Ruth Francken (1924-2006) was an American painter, sculptor, and furniture designer. The Czech painter assumed American citizenship in 1942. She began her studies with Arthur Segal at the Ruskin School at Oxford 1939-1940. After emigrating to the United States, she continued studying at the Art Students’ League in New York City. She worked as a textile desiger from 1943 to 1949, then returned to Europe in 1950 to work as a painter in Venice. She settled in Paris in 1952. In the early 1950s she painted in an abstract style, but gradually turned to sculpture as her primary mode of expression. In the 1960s her sculptures incorporate everyday objects contained in steel, wood, and glass cases, and there are political overtones to work that might otherwise reflect tendencies in pop-art or minimalism. In the 1970s she begins a series of anthropomorphic furniture pieces cast in polyurethane. Francken produced a series of large drawings she called “anti-portraits” from 1977 to 1987 that involved images of figures such as Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Iannis Xenakis, and John Cage. She has lived in Monmartre, Paris since 1985.
(source: Getty Research Institute)

Ruth Francken: Le Pallanquin, 1967 / Aurel Scheibler at Art Cologne 2023, November 16, 2023.

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