Maria Friberg, born in 1966 in Malmö, studied at the Royal University College of Fine Arts, Stockholm, Sweden. She is one of the most acclaimed Swedish artists of today and the list of her solo exhibitions on an international basis is long and includes Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara, California, Conner Contemporary Art, Washington DC och Pi Artworks, London. Her work is included in the collections of Moderna Museet, Kiasma in Helsinki, The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston och Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado
”Maria Friberg’s color photographs and videos are vivid and lush, yet they are also unsettling and coolly provocative. Reversing centuries of what has often been called a “male gaze,” Friberg’s female gaze often captures smartly attired men in unexpectedly solemn, vulnerable and also sensual contexts, for instance a man in a white suit and black trousers lying atop a pile of crumpled automobiles, a perfect symbol for upended power, from Still Lives, 2003-2007, or somber people partially enveloped by abundant foliage in a botanical garden (Days of Eyes, 2014). Nature figures prominently in Friberg’s art and it seems both sublime and ominous. Friberg’s photographs are also exceptionally painterly, including her remarkable, protean, vibrantly colored The Painting Series, 2011, for which she photographed, from below, people sprawling on a glass pane covered with ink and water.
While subverting codes of masculine authority, Friberg’s exquisitely composed and staged works function as enthralling visual forces that conflate wonderment and bewilderment, grace and ungainliness, reverence and fear.”
Gregory Volk, Art Critic/Freelance Curator, Brooklyn, NY