Gloria Friedman

Gloria Friedmann left Germany for France in 1977. Self-taught and mainly a sculptress, this prolix artist developed an experimental energy in activities as different as painting, installation, photography, performance, and video. The deliberately multifaceted aspect and scathing spirit of her approach combine seriousness and futility, in a language which she has cultivated in a manner that is at once scholarly and comical. Pouncing on a historical genre—the landscape— abandoned by contemporary sculpture, she became recognized in the early 1980s through her installations and performances whose subject was nature, which she reckoned she was “part” of. It was nevertheless on “non-human” nature, the one existing “outside” herself, to use her own words, that she focused, and in particular the acts of violence which she suffered. Works such as Vagues Normandie (1983), made of shattered windscreens, and Paysage d’hiver (1986) stem at once from a poeticization of the lexicon of minimal art and a certain culture of the materials peculiar to Arte Povera. Raw and unconventional forms of matter represent her message, conveying it in a full of imagery presentation, whose ‘existential scenarios’ kindle antagonist forces, without any compromise. In associating irony, parody and incongruousness, Friedmann develops the logic of a naturalist metaphor, by exhibiting pieces of a true nature, the fragments of which she moves about using the procedure of the readymade, the better to reinstate the idea of chaos rather than that of a proverbial harmony.