Reviews

"Frances Turner is a painter fascinated by concepts of the 'outsider'. Her subject is the marginal, the misfit, anyone who might be considered outside the norm. Whether her models are children, tortured adults or figures from her own imagination, she looks at the world through the eyes of a surrealist. The atmosphere in her work is always uncanny and not a little dream like, yet the attention to detail and commanding draughtsmanship she employs is used powerfully to convey the humanity, courage and fragility of the human form, in places which are often overlooked."
Rachel Garfield. Art and Culture Critic
London 1999

"The Young painter Frances Turner was first engaged by Gagliardi Fine Art when she was still a student. After five years participation in the National Portrait Gallery's BP Awards and having won early recognition from the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, she is becoming almost an institutional artist. Yet her work which exploits the world of the grotesque, is far from conventional. Her subjects and their uncompromising treatment are highly confrontational. Unusual perspectives married to physical distortion make for an overwhelming surrealism. Her portraits make no attempt to flatter. Her defiantly posed sitters are frequently life's outsiders, who refuse to be belittled, prettified or ignored. Turner's looming bulky figures and her preoccupations with the unconscious belong to the tradition of Bacon and Freud and reflects the insecurity of our age."
Ann Kodicek - Art Critic
London 2000 (from show catalogue - Gaglairdi Fine Art)

"Frances Turner's pictures are characterised by a voluntary austerity, both in the composition as in the visual elements. Over a background suggesting intimacy of an inner space, a personal iconography is displayed that, not withstanding, shelters a thematic transcendence offered by this very particular aesthetic"
Jutta Rutz - Critic and Curator
Mexico City 2000 (From show catalogue. British Council exhibition "Strangers to Ourselves - an exhibition of works by Frances Tuner")