Barbara Friedman’s first solo exhibition at FROSCH&CO presents commanding paintings—unsettling, visceral, and electric—resembling a Rorschach test on acid. Poured paint mutates into shifting forms: eyes, rabbit ears, chicken legs. The grotesque, the horrific, the sublime, and the comical coexist, each intensifying the other.
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The exhibition’s title draws from Metamorphoses, Ovid’s account of the world’s chaotic origins. The reference is exact. Friedman’s process moves from disorder toward provisional meaning. Layers of thinned oil paint spread across canvases laid on the floor. The medium dictates its own movement—seeping, pooling, and drying in unpredictable ways. She waits. Forms emerge, and she draws them out. The painting is not an illustration but an excavation.
Color sharpens this effect. Friedman’s palette—saturated greens, magentas, oranges, blues—verges on neon. The paint emits a strange luminosity, a radiance that hovers at the edge of sensory overload. Chaos and structure press against each other. Looking becomes an act of endurance.
This tension between form and dissolution is evident in Everybunny, where two distinct rabbits are submerged in murky red. The smaller rabbit in the foreground, entirely blue with a red eye, is positioned in profile. Behind it, a larger figure looms, its oversized blue ears stretching across the top of the painting, seeming to emit the intense glow that engulfs its body. Its extended front paw pushes forward, pressing against the smaller rabbit’s face. Both figures drift in the dense, reddish space, floating in suspension. They are sinking together, bound yet distinct, their forms linked in a symbiotic yet uneasy relationship. This pair prompts multiple open-ended interpretations: a parent and child? Lovers? Two parts of oneself?
Another pair appears in Strutting Chicken. On the right, a yellow chicken speckled with red markings plants its claw on a larger creature—possibly a horse or cow—with a large cartoonish oval eye. The encounter is slapstick and brutality—bloodied scratches mark the larger creature’s face, wounds inflicted by the smaller one. Contrast drives the tension. The chicken, painted with loose, gestural brushstrokes, slashes with a claw rendered in meticulous precision. The larger animal is formed from a delicate pale-yellow surface, its abstraction broken by pinkish creases—flesh-like, vulnerable. The softness aggravates the violence, making the scratches more visceral.
In Friend, a lone figure takes center stage. A citron-yellow blob dominates the canvas, its massive open mouth distorting the face beyond recognition. Alien, monstrous—a projection of jealousy or anger. With friends like this, who needs enemies?
These are only glimpses into a show dense with striking images. Each painting emerges through a balance of accident and recognition, shaped by Friedman’s process of discovery. She does not begin with a fixed image; forms arise from the dried layers of poured paint. Figuration is not a choice but an inevitability, surfacing from abstracted forms. All Rude and Lumpy Matter refuses single readings—that refusal is key to its power.
All photos courtesy of Kevin Noble unless otherwise indicated.
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Barbara Friedman: All Rude and Lumpy Matter at Frosch & Co.
34 East Broadway Until April 6 @frosch.and.co