"Threads and Tubes"

Frida Baranek’s works up to this point may be summarized as working within the Wittgensteinian conception of knowledge as thread. Her combinations of different materialities formed an organic whole whose strength lay in the assimilation of differences. The physical presence of her work did not stem from a single and coherent unit of material, but from a double disintegration: first, the whole was disintegrated by the alchimistic mix of several materials, then each of those materials was itself profoundly disintegrated. [...]

1999

Debris. Heaps of iron and stone. Remains of an awkward construction. So, Frida Baranek’s recent sculpture may seem to the eye which yields to the logical demands of her work. The artist herself proposes the temptation of fallacy when referring to the “reconstruction” situations of her sculpture. In the last years, after the landing and the clamor of the neo-expressionist painting, the dust of the pictorial pleasures lies down. A musical band passed, leaving its sounds and paintings. Now, we can see better the sculpture scene in Brazil. There are a ground and an atmosphere where the sculpture is historically concentrated in Camargo and Schendel and centered in the [...]

1993

The concept of sculpture as a stable object, the interest for the material and the manufacturing process situate Frida Baranek’s works within a practice of sculpture which developed in the eighties. The ruptures operated by Minimal Art, Conceptual Art, the in-situ practices and the attitudes felt as dogmatic by a certain number of artists generate practices based on individual research. Again Picasso’s, Julio Gonzalez’s, David Smith’s, Alexander Calder’s or Anthony Faro’s works are revisited in a history of sculpture intimately linked to material exploration. Thus is set the need to work within the limits of the material to reach the work’s content and visual expression, experienced as non-dissociable. Frida Baranek [...]

Laura J. Hoptman

Since Walter Benjamin’s pivotal essay of 1936, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, the reconciliation of the seemingly contradictory terms “art” and “technology” has been a central goal of the avant-garde. The aim was to destroy the monopoly on technology held by industry and demolish the aura of the art object as a natural expression of disembodied aesthetic value. What is missing from Benjamin’s discussion of the dialectic of political power in culture is consideration of gender for the dichotomy between art and technology, not to mention nature and culture, is inextricably bound in our society to femininity and masculinity. As the feminist critic Alice Jardine has pointed out [...]

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. [...]