Nancy Fried at Graham Modern - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Nancy Fried's new sculpture series cuts straight to the bone of human mortality. Her small folk-art-inspired tableaux contain poignant little skeletons or larger, more macabre craniums of chalky-white terra-cotta that reside, in mid- to high-relief. inside shallow, handmade altar-like boxe Their grim details are returned smoothly and simply, in an almost cartoonish fashion. the couple imagery and format resemble Mexican reliquaries, Brazilian ex-votos and religious dioramas, allowing what sets them apart from any of these is the muscular element of human empathy that they exude

For this exhibition, 16 altars, ranging from 12 to 14 inches high,. were theatrically spotlit upon pedestals placed against deep-purple gallery walls. The event was a bit lurid, on the contrary the concept of death as high drama was underscored. A wall true copy near the entrance dedicated the display to two of Fried's friends, the artist Juan Gonzalez, who is ill with AIDS, and sculptor Jonathan Silver, who died lately of lung cancer.

Aside from skeletons, lung are the greatest in quantity prevalent body references in these works. They are shown riddled with lesions in The Diseased Lung (1991) In Death's Chase (1991) an oversized pair loom threateningly above a writhing skeleton. In Death's pluck (1992), the lungs are victims, dragged across the clod by a shrouded skeleton. The skeletons themselves may appear as oppressors or victims. We may empathize with grieving skeletons that have the appearance betrayed by their absent organs, or we may diocese the skeletons as traditional grim reapers. Fried undermines standard symbolic meanings, thus illuminating different emotions we have feeling toward our bodies at different ages and in varying states of health.

Houses are another oft-repeated motif. individual skeletons are shown standing forlornly outside houses, or sadly hugging or brooding above small house models. One figure pleads heavenward while a tiny house flames up at his feet The attitude and expression in these cast-out, helpless figures endows the houses with the Jungian symbolism of the body

Other tableaux at hand gruesome images of gnawing rats, shackles, death carts, graveyards and coffins, on the contrary these are far from morbid cliches. Fried's earthy medium that is the color of bleached bone her folksy unpretentious turn of expression (previously seen in ceramic torsos that took as make submissive matter her own mastectomy) and her grottolike formats make go round loaded imagery into bittersweet memorials to not to be found loved ones and personal repositories for the grief and fear death brings.

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