Frieze Viewing Room: New York Edition

6 - 17 May 2020

For Frieze Viewing Room: New York Edition, Luhring Augustine presents a selection of works by four artists, Christina Forrer, Tom Friedman, Sanya Kantarovsky, and Emo Verkerk, who through a variety of mediums share a focus on figuration. As this unprecedented moment finds us newly estranged from the company of others, this emphasis on the figure reaffirms the significance of presence in a time defined by distance.

While we increasingly occupy online worlds, artworks centering the human body ground us in the reality of our physical, corporeal condition while celebrating our shared humanity. Including works created by Forrer, Friedman, Kantarovsky, and Verkerk, this collection of paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints, and tapestries is populated by the figures, both real and imagined, who inhabit their worlds.
Christina Forrer

Animated by an interest in fables and folklore, Christina Forrer’s vibrant weavings explore the depths of human emotion. While many of her works showcase dramatic moments of explosive conflict, the grouping presented here focuses on more private anxieties and internal tensions. These weavings and watercolors showcase Forrer’s signature representational style, featuring fantastical characters with cartoonish features rendered with a keen attention to boldness of color and richness of pattern.

Photo by Scott Rodd
Tom Friedman

Tom Friedman is widely known for his intricately constructed objects that challenge and stimulate perception and reward close viewing. His works’ carefully cultivated appearance of industrial fabrication belies a painstaking handcrafted process. On view here are two new sculptures that employ all-over dot patterning to enhance their visual effect and increase their surrealist impact.

Photo by Justin Kemp
- Tom Friedman, DogHouse, 2020
- Tom Friedman, Sleeping Figure, 2020
Sanya Kantarovsky

Sanya Kantarovsky is represented by a group of new watercolors and recent woodblock prints. The intimately-scaled watercolors on paper were made by Kantarovsky over the past two months. The exceptional woodblock prints on washi paper were made in collaboration with The Adachi Institute of Woodcut Prints in Tokyo.

Photo by Josh Olins
Emo Verkerk

For more than 30 years, Dutch painter Emo Verkerk has created an extensive body of work in portraiture, picturing a wide array of well-known figures with whom he shares a strong affinity. Given this deep identification with his subjects, the works operate as surrogate self-portraits. This presentation includes a selection of honest, yet idiosyncratic bust length portraits of famous contributors to politics, literature, and society from throughout Western civilization, including poet Edgar Allen Poe, President Abraham Lincoln, and Lakota Elder Wallace Black Elk, among others.
Checklist
- Emo Verkerk, Wallace Black Elk, 2020

Frieze Viewing Room: New York Edition

Christina Forrer

Tom Friedman

Sanya Kantarovsky

Emo Verkerk

Checklist