Forbes
Barbara Friedman
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.