From August 3 through September 15, BCBART will present FACE LIFTS (Museum studies) new paintings and drawings by BARBARA FRIEDMAN.
In this exhibition, the artist Barbara Friedman focuses on her current passion: the reinterpretation and reinvention of signature paintings from New York’s finest museums. According to Ms. Friedman, “I ‘perform’ as an artist while symbolically wearing the smock of the faithful museum copyist--an old trope often associated with ‘lady’ painters. I attempt both to honor and subvert this stereotype by parking in front of images, responding to them intuitively, and letting them become generative springboards… [A]t some museums, like the Met, I have to get my painting stamped ‘this is a copy’. This official stamp marks my painting as non-art, meaning that it’s not from the museum’s collection. I think of this as the counterpart to ‘Ceçi n’est pas une pipe,’ (This is not a pipe*), an addendum that both denies the artwork’s function and let’s it take on a new function.”
Ms. Friedman adds, “On the days that my copyist’s permit doesn’t allow me to paint, I do charcoal drawings instead. On one occasion I used a sketchpad that had glassine interleaves, and when I opened my pad at home, I found that parts of the image had transferred to the glassine. What had rubbed off struck me as being far more interesting than my original drawing. Now when I complete a drawing in a museum, I close the pad, stick it in my backpack, open it at home, and accept whatever has transferred to the glassine as my finished piece.”
A reception for the artist will be held at BCBART on Saturday, August 3 from
6 to 8 pm.
Also on view at BCBART will be a group show of gallery artists, including work by Fred Scruton, Garth Evans, and others.
*A famous annotation to the pipe painting by Belgian surrealist René Magritte.
BCB ART is located at 116 Warren Street in Hudson, New York 12534
Gallery hours are Thursday-Sunday 12 to 6 pm.
For further information, please contact the gallery at 518-828-4539