Art@Bainbridge Preview: Body Matters / Martha Friedman, May 20–July 10, 2022

Art@Bainbridge Preview: Body Matters / Martha Friedman
May 20—July 10, 2022

Martha Friedman is a Brooklyn-based artist whose multimedia practice incorporates choreography, printmaking, drawing, cast and poured rubber, handblown glass, wax molds, and concrete into works that encompass a range of disciplinary interests. On view beginning May 20 at Art@Bainbrige, Body Matters brings together two of Friedman's recent projects: a group of blown-glass, rubber-wrapped busts that Friedman cast from the body of her collaborator‚—the choreographer and dancer Silas Riener, Class of 2006‚—and a series of large multilayer rubber paintings set into light box structures. In both, the artist mines the space between visceral and intellectual experiences of the body to consider the ways in which our physical form shapes our understanding of being human, just as it has inspired a desire to transcend those limits.

In these works, Friedman draws inspiration from the sculptural traditions of ancient Egyptian mummification, Greco-Roman portrait busts, nineteenth-century public monuments, and drawings of the brain's structure by the early twentieth-century neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal to explore how developments in the understanding of the mind and body have shaped representations of the individual and concepts of humankind's place in the universe throughout history. A close study of ancient materials and processes of mummification inspired Friedman's system for wrapping the glass busts, while the viscous, variably translucent quality of rubber allowed Friedman to adapt the language of Cajal's neuron drawings for her own artistic explorations. Throughout the semester, Friedman, a senior faculty member in Visual Arts at Princeton, will be discussing these works with students in classics, humanities, and art history classes.