Lance Friedlande's paintings examine the human condition through a series of portraits, landscapes and environments with figures and animals (some observed and some invented). His methodology often starts as an abstract construction and evolves into the figurative. The element of chance is used to set up a dialogue between the artist and the work. The device of duality between the formal compositional elements and the subject are exploited to generate creativity. Work processes are often changed to facilitate regeneration. The artist is continuously seeking the element of truth and a moment of purity in his work. His processes and results label him loosely as a Neo-Romantic expressionist.
The artist was born in Johannesburg, went to school at KES and obtained degrees at the University of Witwatersrand.
One man shows include those held at
Exhibitions with Gordon Froud at
Overseas and local collections include
Major influences are Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning and Richard Diebenkorn.
“The artist's work is a celebration of the medium of oil paint and its capacity to both refer to the familiar (the artist delves into art history and personal experience) and evoke novelty through unusual and expressive explorations of the South African landscape and the human figure as well as objects used daily.
[Friedlande explores]...painting and specifically the exploration of the
painterly qualities of oil, colour and technique. In his own novel way he
grappled with these aspects and came up with his own form of
expressing landscape and the human figure. In this exploration
Friedlande studied ,amongst others, the work of other artists –
especially the work of De Kooning and Bacon.
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The work of this artist can be described as neo-romantic. We enter, here,
poetic visions of dislocated figures in apocalyptic landscape settings.
I like to pin a few words onto my feelings about his work:
HAUNTING, PSYCHOLOGICAL, ATMOSPHERIC, RIDDLE, HYPNOTIC,
DREAM-LIKE, MESMERISING, SILENT, STRANGE, MOVING.
Friedlande plays with evocative images, sometimes suggesting vaguely
familiar worlds and words. But because the images are so evocative, they
remain fragmentary and open-ended, like bits of language half-understood -
which make sense nonetheless.
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