The Brooklyn Rail

All Rude and Lumpy Matter
FROSCH&CO
February 27–April 6, 2025
New York

New York-based artist Barbara Friedman, who is stylistically rooted in Bay Area figurative and California funk art traditions, presents rebellion against the seriousness of Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting in All Rude and Lumpy Matter, a frisky mediation of chance surprises. Friedman began as a printmaker, a fact evidenced by All Rude and Lumpy Matter’s limitation of paint handling that engenders sophisticated, barely manipulated surfaces.

The exhibit marks the culmination of Friedman’s work during COVID: “It felt right to make characters that were kissing, licking, and nuzzling each other when everyone was so separate.” Nudging images forward with as little intervention as possible, the works on view reserve narrative until after the painting is done. She starts by placing a smoothly stretched, oil-primed canvas on the floor and pours from cans of paint variously thinned with turpentine, unleashing rivulets and dried bits and lumpy bilge that unpredictably puddle and interact physically and chemically. Paint, gravity, and porosity reach a compromise, like sedimentation at the ocean’s shoreline. Silky, alligatored washes of dappled color bleed into each other like water filtering through sand, punctuated by grit, clumps, and other incongruous leavings of fluid dynamics.

For some time, Friedman has let images materialize from empty yet lively chromatic zones. In 2020, she recognized a Pinocchio face in the underpainting of Enjambment (a painting not in this exhibit) and captured the image with negative space, in essence carving away excess background so that Pinocchio could emerge. All Rude and Lumpy Matter extends that process of search and minimal intervention. Mash Up (2021) defines and vivifies palpable, yellow emptiness by framing it with a bunny clasping a human face. Swiftly interpreting a mammal’s head in All Ears (2024) triggers seeing the wash below as legs and paws, sustaining various degrees of an animal’s presence and disappearance in mostly flat but hallucinogenic colors. With Buttons (2024) Friedman strove to tease out a face at the top of the painting but honored its guide by emphasizing outlines of a bird’s head, a fish, and a lace-collared, button-up shirt within a blue and red void of floating detritus. Perhaps the most complex piece in the exhibition is Strutting Chicken (2024), a recycled surface that joins gestural marks buried under a first pour and a swiftly sketched eye to make a bull. A second bright yellow, green, and red pour needed only one gold foot to make it poultry. Spare reference to the two animals activates the colorful upper and lower left-hand corners of the piece; the two abstract zones alternately make the bull’s ears and neck, a delirious slide into dissipation, and a Dionysian garland.

Made in one lucky pour without any further intervention by the artist, Golliwog (2024) melds acid green psychedelic light display with Superfund toxicity, suggesting amoebae and other animalcules subdividing on a microscope slide layers below a tiny, drifting, cross-sectioned heart. Golliwog enjoys only whiffs of boundaries as a dual micro- and macrocosmic form and is the most artist-unoccupied piece of the show.

Friedman describes the evolution of her paintings in terms of not repeating herself and building tension. Underpainting, recycling paintings, and having no predetermined image have always been important to her. Previous series, such as “Uninvited Guest,” “Unreliable Narrators,” and “Darkness at The Edge of Town” suggested landscapes by inserting small figures and buildings into underpainting, a move she’s abandoned in this show. By turns ambiguous and concrete, Friedman’s paintings for All Rude and Lumpy Matter structure figurative abstraction with incidental eyes and nipples from which a viewer can extrapolate bodies—faces, noses, feet, and paws. Friedman surfs atop ambiguity and her own unanswered questions; for instance, wondering if the classical finish of rendering such points of conspicuity is perhaps "too precise," without sinking into self-criticism. Signals of new work are already forming offstage: inventory and analysis of All Rude and Lumpy Matter is spawning trademark, inherent permissiveness. She says about her paintings, “I am learning them, and they are teaching me. I am addicted to not knowing what they are going to be.”

From a beautiful, found chaos of minimal doing, Friedman steps back even further, clinching the sense of totality she’s after: an organically rich, effortless-looking surface that prioritizes real life. Friedman puts underpainting to work, employs negative space imaginatively, elevates fugitive treasure, and most importantly, knows when to stop. All Rude and Lumpy Matter doesn’t showcase best hits; rather, it reflects humanity in humble, silly, vulnerable animal and life forms. And when it comes to bodies, chance can equal fate.

Art Spiel

The exhibition’s title draws from Metamorphoses, Ovid’s account of the world’s chaotic origins. The reference is exact. Friedman’s process moves from disorder toward provisional meaning. Layers of thinned oil paint spread across canvases laid on the floor. The medium dictates its own movement—seeping, pooling, and drying in unpredictable ways. She waits. Forms emerge, and she draws them out. The painting is not an illustration but an excavation.

Color sharpens this effect. Friedman’s palette—saturated greens, magentas, oranges, blues—verges on neon. The paint emits a strange luminosity, a radiance that hovers at the edge of sensory overload. Chaos and structure press against each other. Looking becomes an act of endurance.

This tension between form and dissolution is evident in Everybunny, where two distinct rabbits are submerged in murky red. The smaller rabbit in the foreground, entirely blue with a red eye, is positioned in profile. Behind it, a larger figure looms, its oversized blue ears stretching across the top of the painting, seeming to emit the intense glow that engulfs its body. Its extended front paw pushes forward, pressing against the smaller rabbit’s face. Both figures drift in the dense, reddish space, floating in suspension. They are sinking together, bound yet distinct, their forms linked in a symbiotic yet uneasy relationship. This pair prompts multiple open-ended interpretations: a parent and child? Lovers? Two parts of oneself?

Another pair appears in Strutting Chicken. On the right, a yellow chicken speckled with red markings plants its claw on a larger creature—possibly a horse or cow—with a large cartoonish oval eye. The encounter is slapstick and brutality—bloodied scratches mark the larger creature’s face, wounds inflicted by the smaller one. Contrast drives the tension. The chicken, painted with loose, gestural brushstrokes, slashes with a claw rendered in meticulous precision. The larger animal is formed from a delicate pale-yellow surface, its abstraction broken by pinkish creases—flesh-like, vulnerable. The softness aggravates the violence, making the scratches more visceral.

In Friend, a lone figure takes center stage. A citron-yellow blob dominates the canvas, its massive open mouth distorting the face beyond recognition. Alien, monstrous—a projection of jealousy or anger. With friends like this, who needs enemies?

These are only glimpses into a show dense with striking images. Each painting emerges through a balance of accident and recognition, shaped by Friedman’s process of discovery. She does not begin with a fixed image; forms arise from the dried layers of poured paint. Figuration is not a choice but an inevitability, surfacing from abstracted forms. All Rude and Lumpy Matter refuses single readings—that refusal is key to its power.

The New York Sun

Friedman would be the last person to take on the airs of a higher power, but any artist worth her mettle knows that the challenge of creativity is to yoke life from materials that are, at their base, absent of it.

“My intention is to tell of bodies changed to different forms,” the Roman poet Ovid wrote in Book One of “Metamorphoses.” Picking up that gestational ball, the painter Barbara Friedman has chosen the title “All Rude and Lumpy Matter” for a recently opened show of canvases at Frosch & Co. It’s a direct quotation from Ovid describing the beginning of all things as “nothing but bulk, inert, in whose confusion/Discordant atoms warred.”

The poet goes on to tell of how a “kindlier nature” brought order to chaos, “so things evolved, and out of blind confusion/Found each its place.” Ms. Friedman would be the last person to take on the airs of a higher power, but any artist worth her mettle knows that the challenge of creativity is to yoke life from materials that are, at their base, absent of it. That is the inherent paradox of art and its reason for being.

The paintings Ms. Friedman has been exhibiting over the past few years — a 2023 show at the Crown Heights outpost, Five Myles, was particularly memorable — can be likened to the musings of another historical figure, Leonardo Da Vinci. In his notebooks, the prototypical Renaissance man writes about “stains on the wall,” of how “you can see there resemblances to … an infinite number of things.” Leonardo knew that humankind is forever on the hunt for recognizable forms.

Which isn’t to say that anything resembling “La Gioconda” (circa 1503) is on display at the Lower East Side of Manhattan, just that Ms. Friedman is working in a methodology whose roots are deep. As such, the pictures also have a foundation in the 20th century, particularly automatism — that is to say, channeling the unconscious through unpremeditated means — and the expansive sonorities of pigment typical of Color Field painting. You remember: Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and the like.

Ms. Friedman’s canvases may initially strike viewers as a contemporary variant of Color Field painting, what with their luminous runs of often psychedelic color. On these terms alone, the paintings are fetching. The free-ranging nature of thinned paint — sometimes diluted to a fine grit; at other times, densely opalescent — are arrived at by the pouring of color on a canvas that’s been placed on the floor. The resulting eddies of form extend laterally rather than down; as a result, gravity is suspended.

First impressions are deceiving, and this is where Leonardo’s reference to “resemblances” begins to coalesce. If each canvas is a maelstrom of painterly incident it is also a springboard for, in Ms. Friedman’s telling of it, the “pollution” of images. Although one could spot allusions to the human form in the pictures, the compositions are typically punctuated with fauna or parts of their physiognomy: a snout, a claw, a beak, or feathers. Eyes, too, are a recurring and, at moments, unnerving motif.

Should all this sound like some kind of Surrealist parlor game, well, it is. But that doesn’t account for the oddball strain of poetry at its core, a quality that owes much to Ms. Friedman’s concision of means and deftness of touch. At their best — in canvases such as “Ovation,” “Nuzzle,” and the Bonnardesque “Friend” (all paintings are from 2024) — the pictures are augmented in a manner that confirms, rather than puts a stop on, their spontaneity. Ms. Friedman knows when just enough is just right.

Did I mention that Ms. Friedman’s paintings are kind of funny? If chance incident powers the imagery then eccentricity defines them. Discrepancies of scale, anatomy, and juxtaposition — witness the ethereal benevolence vested in “Nestled Head” or the monumental  snout coming toward us from the other side of the veil in “Golliwog” — make for abrupt and bracing flights of wit and fancy, of occasions and personages as yet unimagined. Ovid would likely approve, as should gallery-goers visiting “All Rude and Lumpy Matter.

Two Coats of Paint

Barbara Friedman’s exquisite grotesquery

Contributed by Adam Simon / In a talk given at the New School in 1949, Willem de Kooning famously said, “In art, one idea is as good as another.” He was referring to ways of looking at art. “If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most of art starts to tremble.” I’ve long thought that he meant that all ideas in art are equal, which I think is untrue. Some ideas in art are better than others. I have my own list of favorites: Robert Gober’s sinks, Fred Sandback’s yarn pieces, Anne Truitt’s columns, Lynda Benglis’ Artforum ad, Tony Conrad’s Yellow Movies. None of these artists are painters, though. In painting, it might be that one idea is as good as another because everything depends on what the painter does with the idea, what happens in the painting. I can think of work by two friends for whom I have the utmost respect whose ideas should be bad: Tom McGlynn’s rectangles of solid color referencing Neoplasticism and Shirley Irons’ flower paintings (some on display at Ptolemy Gallery through March 9). Both artists work in genres that could be considered hackneyed, yet they so transcend those genres that genericism becomes key to the work’s strength and, ironically, its originality.

The modus operandi behind much of Barbara Friedman’s work, including her current exhibition “All Rude and Lumpy Matter” at Frosch & Co., has a name, pareidolia, which refers to finding images within abstraction. Think of the age-old pastime of finding faces in clouds. I once tried to convince fellow art students during a class trip to the Barnes Museum that there was a couple having sex in a Soutine landscape. I’m sure that I would see the same couple if I was in front of the painting today. Friedman’s technique involves pouring oil paint, heavily diluted with turpentine, onto flat linen, so that the colors interact in unpredictable ways. Once the paint has dried, she paints in body parts of animals and humans and sometimes bits of clothing, to dramatic effect. 

At one point, I thought that this series was based on an idea that was not so good. It seemed too “lowest common denominator,” its appeal too universal, offering no hurdle for unsophisticated viewers. Locating images in abstract swirls of paint could be an elementary school exercise. But in fact, for me, the hurdle was understanding that the concept was only a vehicle for discoveries manifested in paint. Like most painting ideas, Friedman’s exist to make the paintings possible. De Kooning also said in that talk that “the only certainty today is that one must be self-conscious.” Friedman is a masterful painter who is fully aware of the genre she is tapping into, inhabited by the likes of Pavel Tchelitchew and Leroy Neiman but also de Kooning’s women and Joyce Pensato’s painterly pop cartoon images. Friedman is perhaps closest to Tchelitchew because of the degree of verisimilitude she achieves. In most cases, her eyes, tusks, and mouths are carefully and beautifully articulated, and it is the extreme difference between what is decipherable and what is abstract, between intended imagery and the results of chance, that gives the paintings their emotional pull. 

In a way, what I had to overcome was that I found these paintings too likeable. Of course, likeable is a strange word for some of these paintings that depict grotesqueries, or maybe dæmons in the Philip Pullman sense. To be fair, my responses to her work vary. I find a painting like Tusk, with realistic tusks emerging out of an amorphous blue haze, merely pleasant, while Mash Up, in which a rodent’s paw covers the eyes of a sensuous female profile, embodies a zoophilic eroticism that will probably find its way into my dreams. At least two of the paintings consist of poured paint without any subsequent brushwork, expanding the terms of the exhibition to include pure chance. One of them, Friend, is disturbingly powerful, the elements resembling a creature with a gaping maw just enough, painted in lurid purple, green and yellow, to leave us feeling confronted by another world.

In the past, Friedman’s paintings have drawn on art history and popular culture. She has sampled Gumby and Pinocchio, Humpty Dumpty and Gulliver, Manet and Rembrandt. I admire her ambition to make art that explores the human psyche and the culture that shapes it. Her current focus on animals makes me think not just of Pullman and His Dark Materials but also of the obsessive posting of video clips on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok depicting animals that demonstrate intelligence, compassion, harmoniousness, and other traits that humans often appear to lack.

I still wonder about the degree to which abstraction in Friedman’s paintings resolves into a series of effects. The paintings don’t have the sense of the elemental that a resolutely representational or purely abstract work can achieve. I think this is unavoidable given her concerns, and not so much a liability as a defining characteristic. The merging of two such different genres is a deliberately dialectical strategy, not an organic outcome. Her ability to create psychological drama through her mastery of two very different painting techniques feels almost cinematic. As in a Robert Eggers film, technical sophistication is what makes the unimaginable utterly convincing. 

“Barbara Friedman: All Rude and Lumpy Matter,” Frosch & Co., 34 East Broadway, New York, NY. Through April 6, 2025.

Two Coats of Paint

Two Coats of Paint

Excerpt from “Chromatic propulsion at Frosch & Co.,” by Jonathan Stevenson, august, 2024

“Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / “Out of the Blue” at Frosch & Co boasts a tight concept and adds real snap to the conversation presumed suspended until after Labor Day. The idea is to explore how the color blue ramifies through the lenses of different painters… Barbara Friedman’s arrestingly kinetic Castasterized into the Blue poses an epic reckoning, beautiful and violent.” Full Article.

The Brooklyn Rail

Barbara Friedman: The Hysterical Sublime

By Louis Block

September 2023

Barbara Friedman, A Blooming, Buzzing Confusion, 2022. Oil in linen, 37 x 28 inches. Courtesy the artist.

In the Metamorphoses, Ovid describes the world before creation as a kind of chaos, “all rude and lumpy matter, / Nothing but bulk.” Chaos itself comes from the Greek for gulf or chasm and an earlier root for yawn or gape; so, in its original sense, chaos was not a state of disorder, but a condition of potential, describing the qualities of vastness rather than the vigor of change. If there is a chaos in Barbara Friedman’s new paintings, it is just that: a maw of possibility, full of glistening teeth, gums, and tongues, eyes peering out, each one the beginning of a world. 

Friedman told me that she starts these paintings by laying taut canvases on the floor, wetting them and then pouring layers of thinned oils onto their surfaces. Once everything is poured, she opens the windows of her home studio, quickly sheds her respirator, and closes the door. It is no coincidence that she began this method of working during the pandemic. The canvases undergo a certain quarantine, offgassing while they dry in uncertain ways; and when Friedman reenters the studio, days later, she is faced with chaos, a room full of color filling its given parameters in ways unimaginable at the outset. Unattended, oil and mineral spirits form rivulets that infiltrate every crack in their substrate, but since Friedman’s canvases are so smoothly gessoed, the pigment has nowhere to accumulate, and it is subject to its own nature. There are also chunks of pure paint that have made it out of the pouring can unmixed and drop, matter-of-fact, onto the canvas. They might as well be debris—unprocessed, unnamed—polluting the picture field, bringing it into the third dimension. They act like islands or mineral outcroppings, affecting the flow of everything around them.

When Friedman opens the door onto these abstractions, she is faced with a game of recognition, a necessary reading of the clouds that formed in her absence. What to make of poured color that has hardened into suggestive voids? A cosmos. With the bare minimum of marks, Friedman locates characters and stories within those suggestive compositions. In one painting, a hairy network of tributaries becomes a walrus’s mustache, and in another, Friedman adorns two wandering drips with a shell, transforming them into snail eyes. Elsewhere, she gives a dark glob of oil wings, legs, and bright red eyes—it is a fly stuck in that tumultuous surface. 

Friedman’s alterations are surprisingly spare. Most of the work is in the recognition, in the nebulae of those primary layers, of some sort of creature. There is something beyond anthropomorphism at play here, an actual imposition of life onto minerals, using decoration as designation (cosmetic comes from the Greek, to order). In Mouse King (2021), Friedman has merely added a pair of black eyes; everything else—fur, snout, whiskers—was there in the first uncontrolled layer. Out of sight, yellow, green, and crimson pigments began to settle in an even layer, but something about the relative densities of their suspensions caused the whole surface to break and, slowly, puddles, ridges, and flood plains formed. Friedman takes that distant geology and, with a few finishing touches, forces you to consider it horizontally, as another body in the room. 

Barbara Friedman, Mouse King, 2021. Oil on linen, 44 x 37 inches. Courtesy the artist.

In Ovid’s chaos, before gods intervened, there was “one face of nature in all the world.” We are forced to describe the unknown in terms that are familiar to us, as our imagination draws from our memory and experience. Friedman gives agency over to her materials, which allows for compositions and subjects that simply could not be planned beforehand, as in the enigmatic picture of a vexed chicken, mid-stride, wagging its scrawny arm toward some invisible foe. On its back, riding with mischievous glee, is some dark furry creature, its spine a winding crack in the painting’s tectonics—two eyes and sketched-in paws turn that mass into something with real character. I am hesitant to describe Friedman’s hand as an arbiter in this world, but we are seeing what she points out to us. It is more like we are able to participate in her wonder, as each flourish encourages us to find some empathy in those strange formations. 

Full Website Link

Whitehot Magazine

Barbara Friedman at FiveMyles

"Bat Control in the Mansion". 37" x 28", oil on linen, 2022

By JONATHAN GOODMAN September 14, 2023

Barbara Friedman lives downtown in New York City, where she also maintains her studio. She has had a long-term job teaching painting at Pace University, also located downtown. Her show of paintings at FiveMyles, a non-profit space devoted to a number of art activities in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, is exemplary of the artist’s passion for bright color; partial and complete versions of animals, real and imagined; and an overall conviction that surrealism backs her spirited vision of things. Single paintings are striking, as one-off compositions but they are more readily described as idiosyncratic than eccentric. This means a bit of plausibility enters the works, making them accessible rather than beyond the pale, which the term “eccentric” would suggest, The joining of neon colors, seemingly lit from within, with sharply detailed details of faces, some of them clearly actual and some of them expressed with broad expanses of color, in a color field style, result in an unusual, exciting body of work. The group of paintings, mostly the same size, display their electric colors on the gray walls found everywhere in the space.

"Grin Without" 44" x 37" , oil on linen, 2023

Friedman’s sharp colors are a major characteristic of her work. But, thematically, it is also worth discussing the role of humor in the work. Bat Control in the Mansion (2022) is a collection of disparate but recognizable animal imagery: the small head of a bat facing downward from the upper left toward the center of the paper. And the center is taken up by the bulbous face and body of a walrus whose skin is a bright red. Beneath the two black pinholes that stand for eyes, is a thick mustache–a mustache so thick it matches the mustache of Stalin. The allusion may well seem far-fetched, but the point is that Friedman is not operating within any constraint that would limit her imagination.  Anything could be possible, and is.  Grin Without (2023) shows the smile, painted photorealistically, of a porpoise with a broad, smooth gray skin; the area around the eye on the right is yellow. Once again Friedman’s excellent technical skill takes over, but the realism of the painting is humorously undercut by the smile and its very porpoise-like but also nearly human-seeming demeanor.  Each of Friedman’s paintings are strange in proportion to their odd coloring, being more true to art than to nature. But their odd compilation of detail, which doesn’t match what we expect of a realistically rendered creature, makes the work memorably biased in favour of Freedman’s expansive imagination. 

"Blue Spittle" 37" x 28", oil on linen, 2021-22.

In Blue Spittle (2021-22), Friedman takes a very primal image of a sea creature's mouth, with the teeth in perfect, frighteningly sharp array and the tongue hanging out in an aggressive, somewhat erotic fashion.  Red, the color of passion, but also the color of blood and its implied violence, dominates the composition, ranging from a bloody mist to a thicker reddish hue. The open mouth is set in the center of the composition. At once an image from a horror movie and, perhaps, a study of a particularly unattractive sea creature, the cavernous mouth, inhabited (as described) by sharp teeth and a ghastly tongue, presents danger without compromise. We cannot tell if the animal is real or imagined, but maybe that’s the point– Friedman operates very well within the cusp of the imaginary and the true.

Mount Rushmore (2022-23), a work painted in an acid green, shows a badger-like animal slinking across the top of the composition. Beneath it is a close study of a prominent nose with a mustache. The viewer is hard put to join the work’s title to the imagery, but little matter– Friedman seems determined to make monuments from objects, usually small things to see. The artist, whose drawing skills are very strong, juxtaposes far-flung objects in the hope that the relationships will comment on ties we wouldn’t necessarily see: a major feature of the surrealist outlook. In many ways her work is an Americanization of the surrealist tradition, here done extremely well in the hands of someone devoted to craft, and who wants to advance the juxtapositions occurring among things not necessarily intended for close comparison. WM

Click to Visit Website

Forbes

Three To See: From Friends and Acquaintances

by Tom Teicholz

August 29, 2023

Barbara Friedman: The Hysterical Sublime, Five Myles, Brooklyn NY August 19-September 5, 2023

Barbara Friedman, whom I've known since we were both in college has an exhibition of recent paintings, The Hysterical Sublime, at Five Myles gallery in Brooklyn, at 558 St Johns Place in Crown Heights.

Over the last few years, I've watched as Friedman's work has changed, morphing in terms of subject matter, color, technique, and I've admired her courage and fearlessness in exploring where the work takes her.

The works on exhibit at Five Myles are subversive on many fronts. Let's begin with the show's title, The Hysterical Sublime, which conjures the kind of oxymoron that Dada and Surrealism delighted in (such as the game of Exquisite Corpse). Like those artistic practices, Friedman's new work involves a deliberate act of chance, which is then improvised into art.

Friedman begins by pouring paint onto the canvas and allows it to pool, and dry. On one level, Friedman is allowing the paint to find its level, to make its mark. But she chooses the color, she manipulates the canvas, she decides whether she wants to proceed. Does the paint do what it wants or what Friedman wants it to do?

Regardless, the canvas then becomes a Rorschach of sorts in which Friedman determines what animal she sees or can create from it. The colors are bright and the animals can be frightening, familiar, funny, surreal, or all the above – like flashes from our unconscious; or each its own microdose of an imagined day-glo creature.

There is a contrast between the pools of color and the fine details Friedman adds to the animal heads that reinforces the surreal qualities and contradictions of The Hysterical Sublime.

The paintings can be whimsical such as in Sniff, where a dog has a snail at the end of its nose; or frighteningly fierce in Why the Chicken Crossed the Road (is the chicken pointing a gun?). One of my favorite works is Early Bird in which a predatory bird has snared a snake in its beak – yet there is something about the painting – the color and the feeling it conveys – that, to me suggested, however improbably, Chagall.

Leaving one to ask: Hysterical? Sublime? I say both.

click here for full article

Two Coats of Paint

The best painting-centric guide to art galleries in NYC, Brooklyn, and Queens / This month in Brooklyn we look forward to seeing “Frances Brady, Much More Together,” a collaborative collage project created by Marta Lee and Anika Steppe at Underdonk (opens on August 5) and Barbara Friedman’s solo show “The Hysterical Sublime” at FiveMyles (opens on August 19).  Full Article

Delicious Line

Excerpt from “Hauntings at FiveMyles,” by Elizabeth Johnson, April, 2020

“… Barbara Friedman visited Pinacoteca di Brera museum, in Milan, and decided to borrow the background portion of Liberale da Verona’s Renaissance portrait of St. Sebastian: perched in balconies, small women converse at crotch level on either side of the large saint. This scene found its way into her painting, Hard Rain, which is painted over Castle in the Sky, an earlier work that floats a dreamy castle in a hopeful void. Hard Rain is foreboding: as fog consumes the castle, the women–recontextualized as a jury–decide the fate of a young, male supplicant. The women seem to act as one, they communicate without speaking, they guard an unreachable mystical goal.

As she works, Friedman remains neutral toward her characters, letting them surprise her with their changes. About the women in Hard Rain, she says, “the women aren’t reaching out to help him, or at least they aren’t yet, and of course, they still might do so. He’s male and probably an intruder of some sort. He seems young and vulnerable–much more so than I intended him to be.” A related painting featuring the same chorus of women, Renaissance Penis, freed her to remove St. Sebastian’s loincloth and reveal a large, dangling penis. She continues, “In both paintings I feel for these women; they come out on their balconies into a haunted world: either some guy is hanging off the rails or they’re face to face with a penis... I feel for the guy, too.”
http://deliciousline.org/dq/content/2020-04-22T1411/

The East Hampton Star

The East Hampton Star :
"It’s hard not to love Barbara Friedman’s “Pinocchio and Mantegna” in its attention-grabbing lime green and red palette, which at first pass appears more like a random massing of color. A closer inspection reveals the classic foreshortened feet of Mantegna’s “Dead Christ” serving as bookends for a blurry but recognizable wooden doll." https://www.easthamptonstar.com/…/…/opinion-all-neighborhood

AFTER VASARI

Studio Visit: Barbara Friedman

by Paul D'Agostino

writings on artists and artworks and where they exist

Barbara Friedman in her studio in downtown Manhattan. Click on images in this post for larger views.

Barbara Friedman in her studio in downtown Manhattan. Click on images in this post for larger views.

Barbara Friedman’s broadly expressive depictions of often comically collared, sometimes art-historically identifiable someones are certainly no less, and perhaps a great deal more, than parodically unsettling decapitations of the tradition of portraiture—a tradition that might be considered questionably moralizing, on the one hand, and formally deterministic, on the other—all rendered aesthetically pleasing, and freshly so, by virtue of the artist’s preference for palettes beaming with surprisingly saccharine subtleties, and for now jarred, now divisively defined, now calmly considered compositions and applications.

All the same facets of Friedman’s works render her parodical decapitations all the more uniquely, curiously unsettling.

And all the more splendidly amusing.

And all the more, in a word, bizarre.

And bizarrely hard to shake.

Like the hint of terror in a rumble of maniacal laughter—even if its source, however creepy, is harmless.

At any rate, here are a few more images of Friedman’s works to jar, confuse and amuse you. Indulge in her gleaming whites, conflagrant oranges, sugary pinks and lustrous blues.

And perhaps listen close for a peculiar cackle.

Two Coats of Paint by Sharon Butler

March 8, 2013

EMAIL: A note from Barbara Friedman

6:42 AM  Sharon Butler  2

Hi Sharon,

It was so nice of you and J to come [to the Soapbox at Studio 10] last night. We had to stay and say hi to latecomers, so by the time we finally got to Tutu's, you'd already left. The four of us must make a dinner date! Thanks for suggesting I send you jpegs of my work in the show. These drawings were also up initially but we took them down for the event.

For the last six months or so I've been painting in museums. I cart my paints and portable easel to the Met, the Hispanic Society or the Brooklyn Museum. It's been fun - lingering in front of a piece long after others have moved on. Here are images of some drawings (charcoal on glassine) also made on site.

I hope you find your notebook. I was thinking about that this morning. It'll be interesting to compare your two notebooks when the lost one turns up - which it inevitably will. Have you seen Jay deFeo at the Whitney?  When I lived in San Francisco she was such a legend there....
 

Barbara Friedman is a New York artist and a member of the distinguished art faculty at Pace University's Dyson College of the Arts and Sciences. These drawings were recently included in "20/20/13," an exhibition at Studio 10 in Bushwick that also featured work by Kevin Curran, Paul D'Agostino, Joan Logue, Cathy Quinlan, and Adam Simon.

The Brooklyn Days

FRIDAY, APRIL 25, 2008

The Tenuous Universe

Last week I attended the E32 art series, hosted by Linda Griggs, despite some deep forebodings, based upon past unfortunate experiences with arts groups that met at cafés on the Lower East Side. I am very pleased to report that the past unfortunate experiences were NOT repeated; on the contrary, it is my sober conclusion that this event was far superior, in both content and attitude, to the Armory Fair. At least, I had a lot more fun there.

I was particularly struck by the paintings of Barbara Friedman, which at first sight appeared to be mere blurred photo-depictions, but upon deeper inspection, proved at once more painterly and more metaphysical. The physical world is indeed an illusion, resolving momentarily out of linear time, then sliding away again. 

'Ferris Wheel,' Barbara Friedman, 36"x 27", 2006

A salient feature of her style is the bright, almost fluorescent underpainting, which is allowed to glow through the image at key points, intimating the existence of an otherworldly light penetrating into this one.

'The Garden of the Fitzi-Continis, 45"x 60", 2005

They manage to be romantic, melancholic and downright creepy, all at the same time.

'Yellow Splashes,' 36"x 84", 2006

Barbara says that she usually starts out with a specific image in mind, but often her original plan is completely obliterated by the time she is finished. Her work has been compared to Richter, of course, but has a warmth and depth that Richter's lacks....

Two Coats of Paint: Valentine hearts painting by Sharon Butler

October 14, 2012

Valentine hearts painting

10:10 PM  Sharon Butler  0

 I went out to Ridgewood today and caught the last day of "4 Who Paint," a group show at Valentine that features work by Lauren Collings, Barbara Friedman, Gili Levi, and Shelley Marlow. Although I didn't discern a clear curatorial premise, the paintings look good, bouncing ideas off each other and reveling in their sheer painterliness...

 Barbara Friedman

"4 Who Paint: Lauren Collings, Barbara Friedman, Gili Levy, Shelley Marlow," Valentine, Ridgewood, Queens, New York, NY. Through October 14, 2012
 

Face Lifts: New Paintings and Drawings by Barbara Friedman_ Artcritical

BCB Art

116 Warren Street . 518 828 4539

Opens: 08/03/13, Closes: 09/15/13

www.bcbart.com

“I ‘perform’ as an artist while symbolically wearing the smock of the faithful museum copyist–an old trope often associated with ‘lady’ painters. I attempt both to honor and subvert this stereotype by parking in front of images, responding to them intuitively, and letting them become generative springboards… [A]t some museums, like the Met, I have to get my painting stamped ‘this is a copy’. This official stamp marks my painting as non-art, meaning that it’s not from the museum’s collection. I think of this as the counterpart to ‘Ceçi n’est pas une pipe,’ (This is not a pipe*), an addendum that both denies the artwork’s function and let’s it take on a new function.” Barbara Friedman
exhibition closes September 15
Barbara Friedman, Dutch Woman with Yellow Lungs (after Susanna Lunden by Rubens), 2012. Oil on wood, 24 x 18 inches. Courtesy of the Artist

Barbara Friedman at Michael Steinberg Fine Art_ Artcritical

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

by THE EDITORS

On view until July 2 in the project room at Michael Steinberg Fine Art in a show of Friedman’s Sumi ink drawings presented in conjunction with her “Overlook Paintings” in the main gallery.
526 West 26th Street, Suite 215, between 10th and 11th avenues, 212 924 5770

This was an artcritical PIC in June 2009

Paint, Memory

Paint, Memory - Catalogue essay by Lilly Wei for In Passing, Michael Steinberg Fine Art, 2007

    The theme of disappearance and loss, time and memory is present in one way or another in all of Barbara Friedman’s paintings but became less an inquiry into the inevitabilities of the human condition inflected through a specific temperament and more inconsolable after 2001.  Friedman, who lived—and still does—very near the site of the World Trade Center was overwhelmed at first and responded to the attack tentatively, obliquely. Lightening her palette, using colors that were pale, pastel, less bold than in previous ventures, gradually softening, then blurring the contours of her images, tempering reality, Friedman depicted scenes on the verge of dissolution, seen as if through a scrim, filtered to suggest indistinct, incomplete, subjective memory. 

    The paintings that followed further explored the contiguity of unremarkable daily life with its dark, disruptive obverse.  These do not form a chronological, autobiographical narrative—although the autobiographical is encoded into the work—but are images, stripped down, scavenged from the peripheries of streaming memory, revenants persuaded into uneasy, tremulous existence.  Eventually emptied of people, depicted objects became Friedman’s surrogate personae.  The haunting Vagabonde (2003) features a white hammock emerging from a lushly, beautifully painted impressionistic ground of many-colored greys streaked with bright, shocking pinks. The hammock, psychologically and emotionally resonant, seems to swing forward out of a dream state. Christmas in July (2004) is similar in theme.  In it, an empty Adirondack chair dabbed with arbitrary patches of more strident, darker pinks is surrounded by a complex white as if in snow, confusing and conflating season and sensation.  Another is of a blurred yellow school bus, rushing through the time and space of what might be a wintry day to and from the sweet hereafter, its invisible passengers captive. There are cars and cable chairs and a cropped Ferris wheel, things in motion or about motion, perceived from odd, slightly disturbing angles. There are also traffic lights, blinking red and green, swinging solitary against a brushed, palpated sky or strung out in sequence like Chinese lanterns, flashing incandescently orange in a void. 

    In more recent work, the foreground images are clearer and in her most recent production, Friedman has re-introduced figures in ones, twos and small groups, as if reassured herself, she is reassuring her viewers.  But many compositions are still devoid of people, such as The Garden of the Finzi-Contini (2006) in which a large expanse of green tennis court takes up most of the painting and is edged by dark trees and an inflamed, portentous sky.  It has the secretive air of a crime scene and invites speculation:  Where are the players?  What happened to them?  Will they return?  (Those who have read Giorgio Bassani’s novel or saw the Vittorio de Sica film to which the painting refers know the answers.)    

    These lovely, poetic, formally inventive pictures with their Richteresque blurs seem to be on fast forward—or backward—a two-way exposition of time and memory cinematically formatted, accompanied by pop references, Proust updated.  Friedman is fixated on time and its deformations, its distortions, jostled as if recorded by a hand-held camera.  Memory also is her subject, but it is a fictive, dissembled, re-constructed memory. Wistful, vulnerable, open-ended, interrogative, self-conscious, these paintings are Friedman’s salvaging operation, her longing to excerpt remnants of life from the inexorable passage of time, her willful act of resistance to our common mortality—and her romance with it.  

Lilly Wei

    Lilly Wei is a New York-based independent curator, essayist and critic who writes regularly for Art in America and is a contributing editor atARTnews and Art Asia Pacific.