MARIA FRIBERG
Swedish artist Maria Friberg works extensively ranging from photography to videos and performances. She skillfully stages motifs and sceneries repeating them with small variations. The content of her work is rich: it is subjected to many connotations and interpretations.
Maria Friberg examines in her works the themes of sexual identity and social relationships. In her recent projects she has explored power and masculinity. Identity as social construction has been one of the key themes of the last few decades. Especially this can be seen in the feminist art that developed in the United States in the 1970´s wth artists like Sherrie Levine and Cindy Shermann who treat the female subject as a result of social stereotypes and codes. Now Maria Friberg applies the same discussion to men.
During the last years Maria Friberg has investigated modernism by focusing on the modern man. The men in suits intrigue Maria Friberg. The suit is a ultimate symbol of the well-organized society where rationality, structure and efficiency rule. The driving forces of the society materialize in the dark suit.
For several weeks Maria Friberg sat in the middle of the IT business center in Stockholm observing the passing business people and occasionally speaking with them, Some of the young men she met became models in her photographs where she has placed them at tables, in cars, swimming pool, on sand and in the ocean.
The exhibition is the first of Maria Friberg in Finland. In Pori Maria Friberg will show her photographic series Almost There, videos Blown Out, No Time to Fall, Somewhere Else and together with Monika Larsen Dennis a video Driven, as well as performance Dream Mile.
Maria Friberg was born in 1966 in Malmö, Sweden. Currently she lives and works in New York. She has studied art history in Gothenburg, art at Nordic Art School in Kokkola as well as in Reykjavik. She graduated 1995 from Royal Academy of Arts (Kungliga Konsthögskolan) in Stockholm. She has participated in international exhibitions in Scandinavia, Germany and San Francisco and has had solo exhibitions in Sweden, Germany, Holland and Austria.