Library Street Collective is pleased to present Bugbee, a two-person exhibition with Sam Friedman and Josh Sperling opening October 18, 2025. The exhibition will feature new works by each artist, in addition to collaborative pieces created jointly by the pair.
Friedman’s ‘Cave Paintings’ move fluidly between abstract and representational forms, investigating the relationship between paint, tools, and surface, often measured against the scale of the human body. He employs repetition and self-imposed constraints to allow chance and imperfection to emerge, creating works that feel boundless and meditative. Meanwhile, within his ‘Double Bubble’ works, Sperling distills architectural forms into pared-down vocabularies. He constructs complex plywood frameworks, which he covers with stretched canvas and paints in bold, often contrasting colors. The resulting works occupy a space between painting and sculpture, image and object. Though both artists employ gestural, free-flowing forms, their practices are grounded in rigorous technical consideration and skill.
Alongside form—evident in the content of the paintings and in the irregularly shaped substrates that the artists employ—color serves as a unifying force in the exhibition. Sperling’s refined surfaces explore chromatic interplay and optical vibration, while Friedman builds luminous atmospheres through gradients and freehand lines that suggest horizons, skies, or shifting light. In both practices, Sperling and Friedman’s palettes become agents of spatial and emotional resonance, transforming flat supports into immersive experiences.
Reflected in both the visual and conceptual foundations of their work, Friedman and Sperling have been lifelong friends whose practices have continually informed each other. The exhibition’s title, Bugbee—taken from the preschool the artists attended in Oneonta, New York—speaks to this formative bond and celebrates their lifelong creative journeys, which have evolved both independently and in harmony with one another. Today, the artists live and work in upstate New York—Friedman in Pleasant Valley and Sperling in Ithaca—where the surrounding landscapes fuel their shared pursuit of forms that feel infinite and open-ended.
The show is complete with two paintings developed collaboratively by Friedman and Sperling, an act they have engaged in periodically throughout their careers. In these collaborations, Friedman and Sperling’s individual voices remain unmistakable, yet their processes merge so fluidly that the results feel wholly singular—testaments to both their enduring friendship and their shared commitment to the language of postwar American abstraction.
Bugbee is on view from October 18, 2025 through January 14, 2026 at Library Street Collective.