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Friederike Feldmann at Galerie Barbara Weiss - Berlin - Brief Article
Art in America, Oct, 2003 by David Gleeson
Friederike Feldmann's approach to painting appears both scientifically methodical and perfectly decorative: she decides on a theme and paints versions of it before moving on to another, which is worked through in the same exploratory manner. Past themes have included recognizable motifs from art and architecture: the Tower of Pisa, the Amber Room, Persian carpet patterns, etc. Executed in silicone dyed with acrylic paint and applied with a knife, the finished canvases resemble an Op-art take on a style somewhere between the teeming pointillism of Seurat and the broken tachisme of Pissarro or Vuillard, with a thickly impastoed finish filtering everything through a screen of Rorschach blots.
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Consisting of seven paintings based on postcard views of the sumptuous interiors of Baroque palaces, "La Chambre de la Reine" was named for Marie-Antoinette's bedroom at Versailles, which appeared in two of the paintings, including the show's most striking image, Marie-Antoinette 2 (2002, 67 by 94 1/2 inches). Here, Feldmann's style rises to the challenge of the excessively ornamental magnificence of the room. With a palette restricted mainly to various shades of brown, the essentially representational rendering of the source material dissolves into painterly abstraction when viewed from close by.
The other palatial interiors featured in the exhibition were the Millionenzimmer from Vienna's Schonbrunn Castle (three views), Louis XVI's bedroom at Versailles and an interior from Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin, Charlottenburg (2003), which, at 25 by 36 inches, was the smallest work on display. Generally more colorful than Marie-Antoinette 2--particularly Millionenzimmer 1, which is a spectacularly warm red color field--these other works did not deliver quite the same visual impact or comment so eloquently on the construction of spatial imagery and the disintegration of human grandeur.
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