Fridman Gallery will opens its doors to two exhibitions on two-floors of the gallery later in September ~ Azuki Furuya: Fragility and Hana Yilma Godine: Spaces within Space.
This is the first U.S. solo exhibition of Japanese artist Azuki Furuya, whose ingenious works on paper explore the fragility of memory.
The material process itself is a form of storytelling. After drawing the composition from a photograph on a wooden or metal board, Furuya builds it up with layered bits of colored paper, magazine cutouts and fragments of the photograph, then meticulously sands down the papered surface until it is exposed like a derelict billboard, and paints inside and around the contours. The resulting artworks are highly textured and luminous, a testament to precariousness and persistence of life, memory and myth.
Furuya does not stop there. With the shavings leftover from the sanding, she remakes paper pulp, shapes it into a sculptural form, and transfers the original photograph onto the reconstituted surface. The underlying images can be family photographs, Ukiyo-e prints, and historical images, such as those of the 2011 Fukushima earthquake and nuclear disaster. In Furuya’s art, the images become ingredients in the neverending process of re-formation of identity. Fragments of trauma are unearthed, ground down to ash and repurposed, giving rise to a form new and vital.
Fridman Gallery, now representing the Ethiopian painter, Hana Yilma Godine, will hold her first New York exhibition, Spaces within Space.
Godine’s work is influenced by observations of her surroundings and social structures during her upbringing in the multicultural metropolis of Addis Ababa, and travels in Europe and the United States.
“I think about painting as a space that mediates time and place, reconciling the past, present, and future into one unified form. Figures are central to my compositions. Their colorful, transparent, and collaged surfaces suggest embedded histories and embodied feelings. My practice has long focused on women–their bodies, as well as their social and societal roles. I work symbolically to communicate the complexity of their lives and see them as a source of life within my paintings.”…. Hana Yilma Godine.
Featuring 12 works, each installed in a different way, and set to magical sounds of Ethic Jazz, the exhibition will take the viewer through coexisting histories and geographies, through psychological and architectural spaces defined by the paintings themselves.
Hana Yilma Godine: Spaces within Space and Azuki Furuya: Fragility will be on view from September 27 through November 1, 2020 at Fridman Gallery, 169 Bowery, NYC.
Opening Reception for both exhibitions will be held on Sunday, September 27th at 6pm. RSVP at info@fridmangallery.com. Please wear a mask.