NEW YORK.- Barry Friedman Ltd. will inaugurate its new Chelsea gallery with an exhibition of paintings by Anne-Karin Furunes on view September 19 – November 10, 2007. The exhibition of paintings from the last five years marks Furunes’ solo debut in the United States. An opening reception will be held on September 19th at Barry Friedman Ltd., located at 515 W. 26th Street.

Furunes, a Norwegian artist, creates haunting large-scale paintings of faces and landscapes by perforating the surface of black or white canvas or unpainted aluminum with hundreds of handmade holes. The holes allow the image to coalesce for the viewer, similar to the dot-screened images in a newspaper. Her subtly pixilated images of particular people and sites reflect the artist’s concern with memory, history, and the nature of photographic reality. For the past decade, Furunes has exhibited her paintings extensively in Europe, and has created a series of monumental public works in Norway.

For this exhibition, Furunes has drawn upon photographs of anonymous men and women discovered in found albums in a Swedish archive devoted to now-discredited notions of categorizing people by race, ethnicity, and mental capacity. Among the images in the archive are subjects of a fifty-year covert program conducted by the Swedish government (and only exposed in the 1970s), whose mission was the forced sterilization of those labeled, “imbecile”, “deviant”, or “a burden to society.” By presenting faces from the archive, Furunes rescues them from a hidden bureaucratic system, restoring a sense of respect for their human dignity. In the artist’s words, “pictures become portraits.”

In her past work, Furunes has pursued this notion of historical recovery with images ranging from women who fought in the Finnish civil war of 1918, to Norwegian Jews who were deported by the Nazis at the start of World War II, to the very young German soldiers sent to occupy Norway at the war’s end, to the visages of contemporary people, giving the viewer a chance to see their peers in a new and poetic context.

In her paintings, Furunes chooses faces, which suggest the presence of a real personality, enigmatic and ungraspable. Rather than explicitly conveying emotion, these faces draw us in, making a connection beyond language and identity. Furunes often crops the images tightly, bringing the viewer into an intimate relationship with each face. Furunes’s work evinces a range of metaphorical readings, emerging directly from its visual attributes. First, there is the mysterious appearance of a face from the painting’s flat surface.

It is a phantom-like presence, insubstantial, yet insistent, and dependent on the viewer’s movement and the play of light. This suggests the unknowable qualities of identity and the way that memory is lost and found. When viewed at close range, the image, which is cinematic in scale, dissolves into an abstract array of dots. At a distance the image is restored to our perception.

The critic Mika Hannula noted this active aspect of looking at Furunes’s work: “You see the picture, how it changes, and you realize: sometimes it helps to go a little further away so as to see a little more closely....You are in the end remaking the painting, re-describing it for that short moment as your place, your face, your memory–your version of reality.”

Then, there is embodied in this sometimes fugitive work the historical implication of those who have been forgotten or purposely “disappeared” from public consciousness returning into view. Furunes has chosen subjects whose story has been denied a hearing, and thus serves as a kind of public memory reasserting itself in the present.

Finally, in Furunes painting there is a meditative aesthetic which prompts the viewer to slow down and attend to the workings of one’s own consciousness, to our capacity for constructing visual illusion, and to the emptiness of real space pervading the solidity of what we regard as real.

About Anne-Karin Furunes: - Anne-Karin Furunes was born in 1961 in θrland, Norway. She studied at the National Academy of Fine Art in Oslo, and is a professor and vice-dean at the Trondheim Art Academy in Norway. She has shown her work extensively in Europe and Australia. Furunes had solo exhibitions at Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Gallerie Traghetto Venezia, and Conny Dietzschold Gallery, Sydney. Group exhibitions include those at The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Barbican Art Center, London, and Art Basel Miami Beach. Furunes’s work is in the collection of many institutions, including The National Museum of China, Beijing, The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, and The Tromsρ Museum of Contemporary Art, Norway, The Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Finland and The Museum of Art, Trondheim, Norway.

Furunes has created a number of large-scale public works, which brings her perforated paintings back into the social space to which they are crucially connected. In 1999, she won a competition for creating a work in the National Theater train station in Oslo. This huge work, 500 meters in length, consists of hundreds of aluminum panels, many with images of faces. In 2001, the National Theater train station won the prestigious Brunel Award, an annual acknowledgment for the best train station and train design. Other public projects include installations for a hospital, an office building, an airport tower, a North Sea oil platform, and a site-specific commission for Deutsche Bank.