arte al dia, 129, dec 2009, pg. 95

By CAIRE LUNA – Pygmalion is his own statue: Angela Freiberger at Frederico Sève. To hell with recovered materials! Noble materials are now in vogue in New York. Gagosian Gallery is presenting In the spring of 2009 a 100%-marble exhibition gathering together antique Cycladic sculptures and Koon’s explorations. Alabaster emerged in the forefront in September at Lelong Gallery, where Jaume Plensa’s monumental, elongated heads invoke dreams. But the nobility of of materials summons iconoclasm at Frederico Sève, presenting the first New York solo show of Angela Freiberger, a multimedia Brazilian artist.

Organs without Bodies plays with Zizek’s reconsideration of the Deleuzian theory regarding the body without organs, a network of moving intensities that opposes the notion of determined machine-organs. The exhibition groups a series of marble urinals and basins with lungs. An eye, a nose, a mouth and small sculptures representing kidneys or hearts carved onto their surfaces as low reliefs. The sculptures are accompanied by photographs and videos, as well as by performances presented the night of the opening reception, a collaborative intervention by dancers Yana Kraeva and Jin-Kang, and artists Denise and Paula Kohatsu of the Brazilian Sisters.

In a reversal of the strategies of classic sculpture Freiberger, who began to make marble objects in the 1990’s, does not carve the totality of the body on her blocks of Carrara marble but rather carves spaces from which organs separated from the mutilated body emerge, and in which the human body, more specifically her own body, nests. The very personal nature of this series, partly inspired by a sequence of Visconti’s Il Gattopardo, intensifies the emotional content of these isolated and stylized organs.

It is perhaps in this sense that we may consider the traces of a Dadaist and surrealistic imagery in Freiberger, in particular in the case of UwR&B I (Urinal with Ribs and Butt), 2004, which is in turn reminiscent of Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. But The Violoncello Woman is replaced by the artist herself, the photographic montage becomes a scar, and the urinal is transformed into a rib cage, echo and component of a truncated body, without any other irony than the one determined, perhaps, by the hegemony—and the misogyny—of the Duchampian intellect.