Martha Friedman: Divided Subject

Martha Friedman

Divided Subject

May 30 - June 22, 2024

Broadway is pleased to present Divided Subject an exhibition of new work by New York artist Martha Friedman.

The Lacanian reference of the show’s title is a tip-off that the artist will continue her ongoing psychoanalysis of Modernist sculpture traditions. Wielding humor and violence in equal measure, Friedman homes in on art historical givens with a critical eye. 

A series of monumental steel skewers form the spines of these loosely figural works. Slotted with outsized hunks of meat and sliced vegetables cast in glass, and cast-rubber body parts made from molds of her muscular dancer muse Silas Reiner, Friedman marshals our collective appetites in a sendup of Minimalism. By reanimating and anthropomorphizing modes of staid Formalism, the sculptures disrupt accepted meaning and expectation via processes that are as complex and precise as they are absurdly grotesque. 

Elsewhere, in some smaller works, we see cast cement limbs coated in luxuriant graphite and fitted with found footwear and exotic cast-glass foods such as geoduck clams, like a Robert Gober at the farmer’s market. These pieces are sometimes situated on artist-designed stands evoking anthropological museum display and engineered to accommodate their weight and precarious balance.

As a whole, the complex variety of materials and technique, as well as dramatic shifts in scale across the exhibition, destabilize the viewer placing them at a crossroads of technical precision and the bluntly visceral.  Just as the sculpted figure in art history is a metaphorical container for meaning, Friedman’s pierced flesh reminds us that the body itself is, in fact, held fast by a delicate, porous membrane. 

Martha Friedman was born 1975 in Detroit Michigan. Friedman’s recent solo shows include Floating Thoughts, Rice University, Houston, TX, Two Person Operating System v.2 (with Susan Marshall Dance Co,), The Kitchen, New York, NY, Brain in Hand, Jessica Silverman, San Francisco, CA, Body Matters/Martha Friedman, Brainbridge House, Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ, Castoffs, The Henry Museum, Seattle, WA.