Step into the Sherman Gallery and chances are you’ll find yourself both entranced and discomfited by the female faces that gaze out at you. Yes, they are beautiful. But Ariel Freiberg’s paintings offer only glimpses of these women—painted lips in one canvas, an eye ringed with mascara and eyeliner in another, a chin cupped in a manicured hand in another. The fragments emerge from behind torn surfaces, and because we never see a wholly constructed face, they remain enigmatic and unknowable.
Freiberg (CFA’04) says she has long been attracted to the human face. “It is the first object of attachment,” she says, adding, “We connect deeply through the representation of faces.” Speaking of the paintings in the exhibit, Ariel Freiberg: Unquenchable Thirst, the artist says she was interested in exploring what happens when one’s identity “must be veiled or erased, ripped and severed.”
Anita, oil on panel, 2015, by Ariel Freiberg. Photo courtesy of the artist
The idea of exploring veiled identities was borne in part out of Freiberg’s own life, and what she describes as her own “fractured identity.” Her family emigrated from Iraq to Israel in the 1950s. “There’s a strong desire in my family and in Western society to sever the Arab face of its identity,” she says. “Our performers and pop culture entertainers, especially women, tend to fall into ‘exotic’ categories.”
Fragmenting the faces makes for a more intriguing experience for viewers, says Freiberg, whose work challenges our notions of beauty—specifically, feminine beauty. “By seeing these faces out of context, it opens the door for the viewer to engage with the imagination.”
“In our culture, we’re confronted with idealized images of beauty,” says Freiberg. “Glimpses of these images circulate in media, movies, cell phones, and so on. Seen out of context, and placed in abstracted spaces, motivates a different engagement with the faces.”
Pierced, oil, iridescent pigment on linen, 2015, by Ariel Freiberg. Photo courtesy of the artist
In several of the works on view, the women—or what we see of them—appear as mysterious figures. The face in Anita, an oil on panel, peers intently at something that has clearly caught the subject’s attention. What that is we can only surmise. Similarly, in works like Pierced and Following, we are introduced to women who are staring at something or someone that only they can see. Not knowing what it is that has captured their gaze makes them all the more alluring. We want to know more about them and the world they inhabit.
“This idea of the gaze, of seeing and being seen, is something Ariel is very interested in conveying through the work because sometimes the figures in the paintings are kind of looking out at you and other times, you’re looking at them and they’re not able to return the gaze, just a part of a face where their eyes are obscured,” says Lynne Cooney, artistic director of Boston University Art Galleries. “She’s playing with all these ideas of seeing and being seen, how those two ideas work to construct gender and interpretations of gender and particularly of women and how women can be objectified.”
Cooney says that as beautiful as Freiberg’s paintings are, there is something undeniably dark and disquieting about much of the work. “In some of her paintings, she uses really bright colors, really beautiful oranges and pinks, really feminine colors,” says Cooney. “But some of her other paintings use dark colors, almost like a storm is taking over the face. There is a kind of quiet, unsettling feeling that emanates from the work that I find very powerful.”
Freiberg’s paintings are an outgrowth of the collages that she began assembling several years ago using photographs and advertisements torn from fashion magazines. She’d rip the images into pieces and reassemble them into what she describes as “new visual arrangements.” Later, she began to make paintings from the handmade collages and the work developed to address the relationship between a fractured face and a sensual, abstracted space.
Artist Ariel Freiberg (CFA’04) center, greeting guests at the opening reception for Ariel Freiberg: Unquenchable Thirst on view at the Sherman Gallery through October 25. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi
By offering only fragments of women’s faces, Freiberg says she hopes that viewers will relate “to the way we only see partially, that our engagement with the surface or the image of a face is only a vessel for a much larger world.”
Ariel Freiberg: Unquenchable Thirst is on view at the Sherman Gallery, George Sherman Union, 775 Commonwealth Ave., Second Floor, through Sunday, October 25. The gallery is open Tuesday to Friday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday, 1 to 5 p.m. The show is free and open to the public.