Derniers jours de l'expo « Entre deux vertiges » de Gloria Friedmann

“It’s an alert and an observation. I see that everything is indeed falling.”

Vigilance inhabits the work of Gloria Friedmann. In clay, plaster, metal, feathers or electric cables, her composite sculptures have long evoked the human figure in its complexity and question our existence in the world.

A stunned observer of a shocking present, she deploys at Transfo a journey of works like a state of mind, a worried look at our humanity and its future in a threatened environment.

This manifesto exhibition is curated by Yvon Le Mignan, coordinator of the Emmaüs Solidarité cultural center. It is accompanied by a booklet including a text by Philippe Dagen, art critic, which the artist also illustrated.

It is presented by a team of volunteers and people supported by the association who invite you to discuss, “in the face of dizziness”.

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opening on Thursday 24 September between 18h and 21h.

exhibition from Friday 25 September to Saturday 21 November during opening hours.

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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 mainly a sculptor, this prolix artist deploys experimental energy in practices as different as painting, installation, photography, performance and video. The deliberately protean aspect and the caustic spirit of her approach combine seriousness and futility, in a language that she cultivates in a manner that is both scholarly and funny. Seizing a historical genre – landscape – disinvested by contemporary sculpture, she gained recognition in the early 1980s for her installations and performances on the subject of nature, of which she considered herself “part”. However, it is on “non-human” nature, that existing “outside” of itself, in her own words, that she focuses, and in particular on the violence she suffers. Works such as Vagues Normandie (1983), composed of broken windshields, or Paysage d’hiver (1986) are both a poeticization of the lexicon of minimal art and a certain culture of materials specific to Arte povera. Raw and unconventional materials represent his message, conveying it in a pictorial setting, whose “existential scenarios” activate the antagonistic forces, without any compromise. Combining irony, parody, the incongruous, Gloria Friedmann develops the logic of a naturalist metaphor, by exposing pieces of true nature, of which she moves fragments according to the ready-made procedure to restore more the idea of chaos than that of proverbial harmony.

Chantal Béret, extract from the Universal Dictionary of Women Designers © 2013 Women – Antoinette Fouque