Nancy Friedemann
On the Margins of a Portrait, detail 2 © 2009
enamel on dibond
36 x 144 inches
The art of Nancy Friedemann, Colombian-born of American and Colombian parents, captures the schism and emotion of living between languages and cultures. Friedemann borrows from domestic craft, table runners, lace curtains and other lace accents as fine-art objects in her paintings – some on a monumental scale. Like Rosemarie Trockel, Lynda Benglis, and other artists, she recasts subjects worthy of heroic scale.
The lace and crochet that existed in her grandmother’s house in Bogota are metaphors of social aspiration, of collective social trauma, of making things veiled, feminine and dignified. Lace and knitting have historically been tools in the resistance to patriarchal order, but paradoxically they represent conformity and submission to traditional standards.
Friedemann reenacts the process of making lace through her paintings. She intertwines elements concerning the iconic imagery of Colombia that deals with the Botanic Expedition of 1783 and Spanish Colonial painting, to convey cultural syncretism and the continuous process of “trans-culturation.”