Al Freeman

Ellie Rines Gallery is pleased to present From Behind, a solo exhibition of ten new soft sculptures by Al Freeman. Freeman’s sixth solo presentation with the gallery, this exhibition deepens the artist’s investigation into the verso: the hidden backside of a painting.

In From Behind, Freeman’s soft sculptures focus on the physical, administrative and conceptual infrastructure that sustains the ecosystem of the art world: stretchers, bills of sale, barcodes and provenance tags. Inspired by Claes Oldenburg’s humorous soft sculptures and Lichtenstein’s back-as-front paintings, Freeman adds her own inflated homespun touch to the tradition. She replicates the backs of paintings as vinyl plushies, each verso given the same attention and respect conventionally applied to the recto. Freeman creates beauty in the accidental compositions that go unseen. The sculptures suggest that the back of a rarified artwork is as important as its front. Might every painting be two sided? Once again, Freeman conflates the high and low aspects of culture, a motif that unifies most of her work to date.

While Freeman certainly includes elements of parody and quotation, From Behind ultimately reveals a sensibility that is down-to-earth, playful, and deeply sincere. Freeman invites the viewer to consider how meaning shifts when we look from a new perspective. By turning generic “masterpieces” around she flips the authority of the historical art canon to open a new and unpretentious dialogue with the past.

Al Freeman (b. 1981, Canada) works in Brooklyn, NY. Freeman reproduces everyday items at an exaggerated scale, rendering them in puffy, tactile materials. But by presenting her polyester, cloth, and pleather works as partially deflated, she playfully imbues a beer can, a hammer, or a lava lamp with a message of subverted masculinity. Drained of their virility and enlarged to a ridiculous size, the objects are invested with a humor that satirizes the simulated coziness of runaway consumerism. In her Comparisons series, Freeman juxtaposes iconic artworks with images found from the deep waters of the internet. Freeman received a BFA in 2005 from Concordia University in Montréal, and her MFA in 2010 from Yale University.