Set Me Free: Terri Friedman

For the last 20 years, Terri Friedman has examined the dilemma of water as a hybrid art form that explores an impoverished yet complex biology, ecology,  and kinetics.  In her past kinetic sculptures, colored water moving or psychodelic inflatable sculptures became both paintings in perpetual motion and breathing bodies.  She recently completed a year long project for Johns Hopkins new Bloomberg Children’s Hospital in Baltimore (2012) where she was asked to create large scale paintings on Plexiglas that responded to Children’s books. Her landscape derived works, which were also featured in a solo shows at Patricia Sweetow Gallery (2011) in San Francisco andat Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica (2007), capture the fluidity, transparency, and reflection of water with paint while addressing the overwhelming and unpredictable power of water to both support and destroy life.  Her projects, while deeply connected to environmental issues of land and water, are more poetic than political.  Like many artists today, her work is interdisciplinary: questioning the artificial boundaries between painting and sculpture, temporal and permanent, artificial and natural, abstract and representational, heroic and humble.   

As Chris Miles wrote in his review of her solo show in Artforum:
            “Unabashedly Pop and decorative, Friedman’s paintings are nonetheless far from landscape lite.  Rather, they are elegant meditations on a world in which our awareness of nature’s movements, once compreheded in glacial time and cyclical predictability, has itself become more fluid. “
            
Her paintings and kinetic sculptures have been exhibited nationally as well as internationally including the Orange County Museum of Art Biennial, Newport Harbor Museum of Art, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Geffen Contemporary (Los Angeles), L.A.C.E., San Jose Museum of Art, Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, W139 Amsterdam, The Icebox Athens, c/o Gallery Oslo and numerous other venues. Her work has been featured in such periodicals as Art in America, Artforum, Los Angeles Times, World Art, and Art and Text.

 She resides with her family in El Cerrito, California and teaches at the California College of the Arts in Oakland, California.