Sam Friedman takes his love of "Love Songs" into a series of new paintings from February 11—April 8, 2017 at Library Street Collective in Detroit.
All photography by Sal Rodriquez
“The paintings are about painting,” NY-based Sam Friedman told us in a text message. Friedman may be humble in demeanor, but he’s bold in terms of the size of the pieces and the incredible output, as his work over the past five years testifies. Refraining from hyperbole and grandiose descriptions does grant the paintings their own voice, each meditation of landscape and abstraction teasing the viewer’s memory of color, time and even sounds. Due to the fact that Friedman alluded to listening to love songs while making the body of work showing at Detroit’s Library Street Collective, the name of the show makes sensory sense. “These paintings have more self-imposed parameters than the works on paper,” Sam notes in the show’s preview text. “While the paint is attempting to reach some level of perfection, the lines sit as perfectly or imperfectly as my hand allows. In this way, they avoid becoming mechanical.”