"It is an alert and an observation. I observe that indeed everything is falling."
Vigilance inhabits the work of Gloria Friedmann. In earth, plaster, metal, feathers or electrical cables, her composite sculptures have long evoked the human figure in its complexity and question our existence in the world.
Astonished observer of a disturbing present, she presents at Transfo a route of works as a state of mind, an anxious gaze cast upon our humanity and its future in a threatened environment.
This manifesto exhibition is curated by Yvon Le Mignan, coordinator of the cultural centre of Emmaüs Solidarité. It is accompanied by a booklet including a text by Philippe Dagen, art critic, which the artist has also illustrated.
It is presented by a team of volunteers and people supported by the association, who invite you to exchange, "face aux vertiges".
-
Opening on Thursday 24 September between 18:00 and 21:00.
Exhibition from Friday 25 September to Saturday 21 November during opening hours.
-
About the artist:
Born in 1950 in Kronach, Germany. Lives and works in Aignay-le-Duc, France.
Gloria Friedmann left Germany for France in 1977. Self-taught and primarily a sculptor, this prolific artist brings an experimental energy to practices as different as painting, installation, photography, performance or video. The deliberately protean character and caustic spirit of her approach combine gravity and frivolity, in a language she cultivates in a mode that is both learned and droll. Seizing a historical genre, landscape, abandoned by contemporary sculpture, she became recognised in the early 1980s for her installations and performances on the subject of nature, which she considers to be a part of her "partie". Yet it is on "non-human" nature, the one existing "outside" of herself, in her own words, that she concentrates, and in particular on the violence it suffers. Works such as Vagues Normandie (1983), made of broken windscreens, or Paysage d'hiver (1986) belong both to a poeticisation of the vocabulary of minimal art and to a certain culture of materials specific to Arte povera. Raw and unconventional materials carry her message, conveying it through an imagery staging, whose "existential scenarios" activate antagonistic forces without any compromise. Combining irony, parody and the incongruous, Gloria Friedmann develops the logic of a naturalist metaphor, exhibiting pieces of a true nature, fragments of which she displaces according to the ready-made procedure, to convey more the idea of chaos than that of a proverbial harmony.
Chantal Béret, extrait du Dictionnaire universel des créatrices © 2013 Des femmes – Antoinette Fouque