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.