Ada Friedman Art Basel Miami Beach 2023 A Suite of Five Paintings

ADA FRIEDMAN
A Suite of Five Paintings
Art Basel Miami Beach 2023 presentation
6 - 10 December 2023

PRESS RELEASE
We are proud to present A Suite of Five Paintings by gallery artist Ada Friedman. Works included are all part of her ‘Pathwork’ series (2022-present). Friedman makes untraditional paintings, with most works hosting one discreet painting on either side of its multi-surfaced structure. Pairs are intimately bound by Friedman’s acute senses of color, structure, and material coordination.

Paper is Friedman’s prima materia, for its versatile malleability. The shapes of her paintings are deftly carved from large swaths of it. She recently showed an exhibition of works that she calls “the pyramid paintings,” all of which are shaped like relaxing isosceles triangles. Although each painting lives within the same overall shape, Friedman positions their angles differently. She often works in series like these, wherein similar geometries separately thrive because decisive paint and gesture define and differentiate them from one another.

Into these large, sturdy, irregularly shaped pieces of paper, Friedman fully integrates intermittently collected and discreetly organized stuff. These items are not adhered to completed, painted surfaces; her works are not collages. Instead, lighting gel or a found doily is a necessary structural component of the entire plane on which any two paintings live.

Her organic sensations of color and brushwork thoroughly define these works as paintings. In many ways they are bare-faced; the artist’s hand and process is on full display. Underpainting, overpainting, note taking, fortifying, and erasing are all plainly legible amidst decisive color coordination.

Friedman takes nothing for granted, starting with her work’s substrates. Paper and all are situated in service to the sure-footed yet searching specifics of gesture and color theory in Friedman’s fresh approach to Abstraction. She deals with Abstraction in the originary sense; not merely as a description of non-figurative play, but Abstraction as the elusive search for a universal language to speak of the condition of experience.