“Everything is reduced to seeing the right thing.”
Frankey
Wandering through the human and urban spaces of diverse cities like Amsterdam, Berlin, New York, or Medellin in search of seeing the right thing in order to create a positive, kind, mischievous disruption of everyday reality leads us as human beings to draw a smile on our faces before the unexpected joy, the sight or object that changes our daily emotion for the better.
And we ask ourselves: where does that joy come from? where does it dwell? and who bestows it to us selflessly, fostering the delight we find in the world around us? This environment is approached in a subtle, mischievous, playful way, through an artistic intervention that manages to focus on the intensification of life, on the experience of it, in order to reveal the magnificence and splendor of the minimal, of the small, and of what surprises us in its unexpected presence.
Hug for Unity │The Magnificence of the Minimum by Frankey
November, 2024
Alvarez Gallery
With Hug for Unity │The Magnificence of the Minimum, the Dutch artist Frank de Ruwe (1977-), better known as Frankey, answers all those questions by bursting forth from the unexpected that arises in the encounter of small, kind, and seemingly imperceptible gestures. Through these gestures, the artist champions human harmony and celebrates ideas expressed in the partial, in the minority, the childlike, or the youthful as terms of the freshness of time and beyond, embodying a flourishing life rooted in the continuous affection typical of the changes in existence, captured through the minimal act capable of magnifying the things that unite us all without any kind of distinction.
Hug for Unity │The Magnificence of the Minimum by Frankey
November, 2024
Alvarez Gallery
Frankey has spent most of his artistic career elevating the minimal, finding the monumental in life’s subtle harmonies. Described as a Street Artist, Frankey pulsates life into the streets of the places he travels and awakens them through a positive disruption that speaks to us of the affection and hospitality the contemporary and global world should possess.
Hug for Unity │The Magnificence of the Minimum vindicates the space of the minimal. Frankey has brought works to North America that introduce us to the sense of human harmony, crafted by the artist out of a sensibility that is not only intelligent, joyful, or mischievous, with a kind outlook on reality, but also collaborative, born from his deep concern for everything that surrounds us in a world and a global reality in which Frankey encourages us to look at our environment and our daily performance from a place where we can unite the differences, as in the 2024 Hug for Unity project, initially conceived by Fernando Luis Alvarez and his gallery.
Hug for Unity was conceived as a collaborative project between the initial idea from Fernando Alvarez and the involvement of artist Frankey, who was selected after a long search for the project’s ideal artist. Hug for Unity was conceived with the possibility of understanding the divides of thought between one side and the other in the heat of the North American political contest, its positions, its complementarities, and contradictions; all this as a process of harmonizing the human in the interest of simple things, produced through the amazement and discovery of opposites in a simple and minimal gesture: a hug.
Fernando Alvarez and the Hug for Unity mascot created by Frankey
November 2024
The Magnificence of the Minimum unites the project of understanding in Hug for Unity with Frankey’s passion for the minimal gesture, a gesture magnified in its monumental smallness and playful appearance, as shown in The Balance Boy or King Pole. The work Frankey has brought to New York is a fresh, fun, mischievous smile, a visual musicality composed from imperceptible visual sounds, from tiny eighth notes lying on the score of everyday life written by the artist from shared, common elements known by all.
Hug for Unity │The Magnificence of the Minimum by Frankey
November, 2024
Alvarez Gallery
Everyday life and life itself, where the small and the minimal become astonishing and unexpected through a continuous action in which everything is reduced to seeing what is right —as the artist himself argues— and that seeing encompasses the realms appropriate for the unexpected, the gestures of the minimal, the hugs of reconciliation of a country in electoral strife.
Hug for Unity │The Magnificence of the Minimum by Frankey
November, 2024
Alvarez Gallery
Hug for Unity │The Magnificence of the Minimum is the amazement at the mischievousness of an artist who compels us to pause at the unexpectedness of a gesture that leads us to the presence of a renewed humanity present in common heritages and shared ideas with no hierarchies; they are only there waiting to find us, making us smile in that encounter along with Frankey’s mischievous kindness, continuously surprising us with his urban and everyday hospitality of what is shared by us all.