Rachel Friedberg’s remarkable body of work spans six decades, from the 1960s – 2010s. Throughout these years, Friedberg worked in wide variety of media, including collage, sculpture, drawing, and encaustic.
Like a fugue, harmonized according to the laws of counterpoint, a dynamic asymmetry characterizes all of Friedberg’s work, a fragile balance that is poised in exquisite tension.
How do we negotiate the fragile balance that is life itself, the dual experience of plenitude and loss that is our deepest legacy as human beings?
Rachel Friedberg confronts her past with tender reverence, encrypting messages in her encaustic grounds and collaged fragments that are drawn from the archives of her most private memories. Her paintings are monuments to the eclipse of time, to life’s unpredictable rhythm, continuous yet punctuated by defining moments. On the silent stages of her deferred narratives, Friedberg relates her story, as fragments of the past shift in and out of focus — ciphers of thought and feeling that the artist seeks to possess and understand.
— Robert S. Lubar, Rachel Friedberg: A Fragile Balance
