Rub
New work by artist Martha Friedman
September 10 – December 30, 2010
4454 Woodward Avenue
Detroit, Michigan
www.mocadetroit.org/exhibitions.html
MOCAD is pleased to announce artist Martha Friedman’s first solo museum exhibition entitled Rub.Artist Martha Friedman’s (b. 1975) sculptures are inspired by common things including food, office supplies and body parts. By enlarging the scale and focusing on details of their shape and surface, her work engages the viewer with the sculptural aspects of these everyday forms. Friedman explores the textural qualities of the materials that she uses and sets them up to create unexpected dialogs between viewer and object.
The exhibition Rub consists of two major new works commissioned by MOCAD. Tongue Flap is a giant rubber tongue that reveals the negative space underneath a large black rubber flap, while Rubbers is a matrix of 108 oversized, hand cast rubber bands stretching to bridge the twenty-foot span between the Museum’s floor and ceiling. Whereas Tongue Flap is a contained—albeit monumental—sculptural work, Rubbers occupies nearly the entire space of the gallery where it is installed, creating a unique environment where these re-imagined and enlarged objects confront and interact with the viewer.
Martha Friedman was born in Detroit in 1975. She received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from Yale University. She also studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Exhibiting in several solo exhibitions at Wallspace Gallery in New York, Friedman has also been included in a number of group exhibitions, including New York Minute at MACRO in Rome (2009), Time-Life Part Two at Taxter & Spengemann in New York (2009), a public work commission from the Public Art Fund at Metrotech Center in Brooklyn, NY (2008) and Bunch, Alliance and Dissolve at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, OH (2007). Her work has been reviewed in a number of publications, most notably the New York Times, Artforum.com and Art Review. Friedman has also held a number of teaching positions at universities including Yale University, Pratt Institute of Art, The Cooper Union and Princeton University, among others. Friedman currently lives and works in New York City.
Also on view: Spatial City: An Architecture of Idealism, the first exhibition in the United States of artwork drawn from the French Regional Contemporary Art Funds (Frac), brings together an international, multi-generational array of contemporary artists whose work contends with utopian thinking and the idealism and cynicism it inspires. For more information, please visit www.mocadetroit.org/exhibitions.html
The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit is located at 4454 Woodward Avenue in Detroit, Michigan, and is open Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Thursday and Friday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Admission is free unless otherwise indicated.
For more information, contact Carlie Dennis at 313-832-6622 or cdennis@mocadetroit.org
