Barry Friedman Ltd. will inaugurate its new Chelsea gallery with an exhibition of paintings by Anne-Karin Furunes on view September 19 – November 10, 2007. The exhibition of paintings from the last five years marks Furunes’ solo debut in the United States.
9/17/2007 :: For the past decade, Furunes has exhibited her paintings extensively in Europe, and has created a series of monumental public works in Norway. She creates her haunting large-scale paintings of faces and landscapes by perforating the surface of black or white canvas or unpainted aluminum with hundreds of handmade holes, making the painting resemble the dot-screened images in a newspaper. Her subtly pixilated images of particular people and sites reflect the artist’s concern with memory, history, and the nature of photographic reality.
For this exhibition, Furunes has drawn upon photographs of anonymous men and women discovered in found albums in a Swedish archive devoted to now-discredited notions of categorizing people by race, ethnicity, and mental capacity. Among the images in the archive are subjects of a fifty-year covert program conducted by the Swedish government (and only exposed in the 1970s), whose mission was the forced sterilization of those labeled, “imbecile”, “deviant”, or “a burden to society.” By presenting faces from the archive, Furunes rescues them from a hidden bureaucratic system, restoring a sense of respect for their human dignity. In the artist’s words, “pictures become portraits.”
There will be an opening reception at the gallery on Wednesday, September 19 from 6-9pm.
When: September 19 – November 10, 2007
Where: Barry Friedman Ltd. Gallery Space in Chelsea, 515 W 26th Street, New York
Info: call (212) 239-8600 or email contact@barryfriedmanltd.com