Portugal based sculptor Frida Baranek was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1961. She earned an M.A. in Industrial Design at Central Saint Martins in London in 2012 and a B.A. in Architecture at Santa Ursula’s University in Rio de Janeiro (1984).
In 2013, she was a recipient of a mid-career survey “Confrontos” at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro. Her work has been included at Bienal de São Paulo (1989), Bienalle di Venezia – Aperto (1990), MOMA in New York (1993), Maison d’Amerique Latine (1995), Ludwig Museum in Koblenz (2005), The Frost Art Museum (2018), in addition to many others.
Galeria Raquel Arnaud from São Paulo, has been representing the artist since 1990. Her work is part of many private and public collections, such as the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas; The National Museum of Women in the Arts, in Washington, D.C.; “Ministere de La Culture, Fonds National d’Art Contemporain”, in France; at The Museums of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro and of São Paulo. In 2018, Frida was nominated by the Frost Art Museum in Miami and The Smithsonian Institute “Women Who Make History”, the 14th Annual Smithsonian Museum Magazine Day. Most recently, in 2019, Frida has been awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Sculptor Grant.
Baranek comes from the first generation to view the world globally, open to moving from one place to the next. Both American and Brazilian, Frida has lived and worked in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Paris, Berlin, London, New York, Miami and Lisbon. Her work is an expression of an industrial society, influenced by a sense of transformation, displacement, and adaptation.
From the early works and throughout the years, the associations that Baranek entertained with materials consists in defying their resistance to lead them to their metamorphosis: to build with and against it. Her work is the expression of her perceptive faith, where perceiving and imagining are two ways of thinking. Manual experimentation with the properties of materials is an important aspect of her practice. As such, her curiosity in the past often led her to appropriate certain elements from nature and human artifacts: trees, islands, swimming pools, domes, ropes, screens, cocoons. For the sculptures, she often used heavy tools and mechanical equipment to transform new and leftover steel sheets and tubes, iron wire, and even airplane parts into abstract sculptures that remind us of forms found in the natural world. When using surplus materials in her installations, Baranek comments their impact in the world we live in.
A complete list of exhibitions, essays and works can be found on her website: www.fridabaranek.com