Bio

Flink in his St Paul Studio, 2022

 

Nathanael Flink is an artist and curator based in Minnesota. He earned a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1994. Flink has been the recipient of the Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship and the Knight Foundation Arts Challenge Grant. He has exhibited his work in solo exhibitions in South Korea and Minnesota and group exhibitions in New York, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Vermont. His work is held in private collections in North America and Asia.

 

Flink had his first studio above a shoe store in Minneapolis. Later he lived in upstate New York. His approach to abstraction developed through a period of wide experimentation, including a foray into darkroom photography. Striving for a balance between expression and playfulness the formal qualities of Flink's work manifest spatial tension evocative of movement.

 

In 2016 Flink was awarded a fellowship to facilitate the exhibition of more than 50 nationally recognized artists at the venue Space 369 in St Paul. Flink has continued to bring about exhibitions as a guest curator. In Minneapolis in 2020 and 2021 he curated two well received group exhibitions at the Casket Arts gallery operated by NE Sculpture with artists from Minnesota and New York.

 

Flink's aesthetic vocabulary and recent work involves a searching for emotive and pure gestures that suggest a relationship with other compositional elements. Utilizing unlikely combinations of mark, color and pattern he creates open ended narratives that react to American throw away culture and the domestic experience. Often his pieces imply an outside world or experience of urban landscape. Much of the time the evidence of his mark making becomes its own compositional subject. Flink creates his work and lives with his family in Saint Paul.