HONG KONG.- Over The Influence is presenting Flesh of the Gods, an exhibition featuring new paintings from New York-based artist Sam Friedman. The exhibition, which marks Friedman's debut solo show in Hong Kong, opened on September 20, and remains on view through October 27, 2018.

Deftly occupying the liminal borders between abstraction and representation, Friedman's enigmatic paintings have a tendency to disorient, plunging the viewer into an unreliable world, a nowhereness at once atmospheric and decorative, mythical and mysterious. Drawing upon personal memories, Friedman explores the tension between recognizable imagery and the artist's emotional and spiritual experience of the natural world.

Blending the representational with the surreality of a dream, Friedman's candy-colored abstractions proffer uncanny glimpses of the everyday, as if viewed through a kaleidoscopic prism. Loose yet precise, Friedman's arresting, otherworldly compositions of fluid movements amongst vibrant patterns aim to capture the idea of memory, an image of distanced reality, more feeling than nature.

Without any preparatory design, Friedman spontaneously breaks down and rebuilds natural surroundings, prompting a sense of dislocation in the viewer. Employing his unique visual language--an idiosyncratic, freewheeling way of applying paint, in which previously intuitive decisions organically dictate each successive mark--the high-spirited, large-scale paintings invite us into a fantastical universe, an abstract tapestry of vibrant flora and tropical sunsets.

Creating a surreal world, both familiar and strange, Friedman's vivid, dreamlike paintings serve as re-imaginings of memory, forever tussling between representation and abstraction.

Sam Friedman(b.1984, Oneonta, New York) has produced paintings for the greater portion of his life, that concern themselves primarily with the formal concerns of paint, tools and surfaces, as they relate to the scale of the human body, while occasionally touching down to get blessed, tainted, or both, by the non-linear narrative of life. Friedman’s paintings pilot a plane that takes us from the ethereal planes to the earthly plains, on a ride that is neither past or present, but rather timeless, accessible, and transformatively escapist.