Aperto 90 XLIV Venice Biennale*

The relationship to space is the essence of three-dimensional thinking in Frida Baranek’s creative expression. Simultaneously, the material, the matter, imposes itself through its aggressiveness visible at first impact. Catastrophist by the use of an industrialized society’s connotative elements, the character of deconstructivist “assemblage” presides over her vital instal­lations, significant in their spatiality: stone (granite or marble), iron plates, flexibles and oxidized wires compound her vocabulary in a vehement speech, apparently purely intuitive. The artist respects the material, which is perceptible in the implicit acceptance of its prior condition. [...]

Galeria Sergio Milliet (October 1988)

It is sculpture itself that is intended to be the issue here. More than this: it is presenting its current possibilities. Radical modern sculpture's destruction of the classical canons has not only meant a complete reformulation of subject and techniques; it has also been a subversion of sculpture's place. It could be said that it has been removed from its paradigmatic position as the centre of the space, as though submitted to the pressure of devastating centripetal and centrifugal forces. With the removal of its original verticality and its base, it found itself in the situation of solid matter suddenly turned into liquid; without shape, able to assume any form. It is then that, wandering and erratic, uncertain and without a centre, it seems to experiment, for the first time, its spatiality - opening out towards all spaces. [...]

Galeria Sergio Milliet (October 1988)

One can conceive and create a sculpture as a game of balance, construction, juxtaposition of forms. Or one can imagine the work as the product of an intervention, as though it were an instant (immobile, timeless) suspended from a curve in movement. The first type of sculpture expands, ideally along the horizontal, creates and constructs a space. The second delves into the depths, through two illusions of extension: the hypothesis of a past and the promise of future development. Frida Baranek's works appear to be remains, witnesses of a disaster. Their raison d'être is to be found elsewhere - an impact or an explosion that occurred in the past. In a series of works immediately prior to these that are on exhibition, the event (a stone falling onto metal sheets) appeared to have just occurred. [...]