There is an interesting paradox to be noticed in the work of Frencken: at first sight, her images seem to depict intuitive, emotional states of being or fragmented pieces of reality. At the same time, these images contain a profound universality and timelessness. Frencken’s works capture a reality of experiences, impressions of daily life, dreams and desires. These works manifest transitory values such as beauty, tradition and nature, sometimes in an explosion of colours and forms, sometimes in modest, darker, paler grey or blue colours and lines or intimate fragile figures.
In some of her sculptures, often wrapped up in transparent synthetic resin, Frencken is looking for a form of overcompensated, cruel, and uncanny beauty. In doing this, she effectively combines aesthetic visuals and darker, more naïve perspectives on humanity. As a result, her sculptures have an absorbing and intriguing force, thereby challenging our common notions of affection and abjection, naivety and guilt.
Frencken experiments with shapes and symbols of high and low culture: she combines and recycles quotes from pop art, surrealism and rococo; she blends the idea of classical sculpture with the aesthetics of pop culture. The sculptures appear equally attractive and repulsive, enchanting and sinister, figurative and abstract, precious and kitschy. Frencken integrates chance as an artistic principle into her work by decorating colored clay sculptures with things she has simply found (objets trouvés) as well as materials taken from everyday life and consumer articles.
She has been trained from her 14th until her 19th by painter and stainless steel professional Louis Smeets (assistant of the prominent stainless steel professional Joep Nicolas). After she has been educated as a fashion designer at the Art Academy in Arnhem (currently known as ArtEZ), alongside teachings by painter Jurjen de Haan. Although it hasn’t always been easy for a female artist to nd appreciation in the masculine art world of the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, there has certainly been success for Frencken. She was nominated for the Prix de Rome, and the royal award for painting; had a solo exhibition at Barbara Farber, a solo exhibition and international representation by the Rotterdam based avant-garde gallery Bébert, and her works have been included in the Centraal Museum Utrecht, The Rubell Family Collection (Miami) and Marta Herford in Herford (Germany) a.o.. Later on she had exhibitions with the legendary Belgium curator Jan Hoet, and also Hannah Hagenaars and Jan Hein Sassen were true advocates of her work. Hoet once wrote: “Frencken uses ‘over the top’ as an artistic principle in her work. Extreme are the irty forms, the multitude of details, the diversity of meaning and the combina- tion of all those things. The ambiguousness of her sculptures pushes Frencken’s work on the thin line between high art and kitsch. A line where she vividly balances on.”