Show Preview | Britt Freda

Santa Fe, NM
Giacobbe-Fritz Fine Art, June 2-16

Britt Freda, Apple Laced Wyandotte, acrylic, 48 x 48.

Britt Freda, Apple Laced Wyandotte, acrylic, 48 x 48.

This story was featured in the May 2017 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art  May 2017 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

When painter Britt Freda became a parent 12 years ago, everything in her life changed. With her world flipped upside down, she turned back to art and began to paint a series of works featuring chickens. Freda reveals these paintings in a show titled The Year of the Cock, which opens at Giacobbe-Fritz Fine Art on Friday, June 2, with an artist’s reception from 5 to 7 p.m.

The show features 15 paintings that vary in size and were completed over the last 12 years. For this show, Freda drew upon the Chinese zodiac calendar for her subject, as her son was born during the year of the rooster. “Chickens felt common, plebian almost, and accessibly unifying, like giving birth or raising children,” Freda says. “Like parenting, I wanted the chickens to be both common and accessible, while also being complex and surprising.”

Freda is known for painting endangered animals as a way of examining the human impact on natural environments and their wildlife. She seeks to tell a story that will evoke questions and produce dialogue with the viewer. “I’m always conscious of producing work that is about something happening either in the world or in the personal realm, and how that work can produce a visual conversation,” Freda says.

The artist describes her style as dissolved abstraction. “There is still that connection with the animal’s face, but I want people to understand what they think they are looking at and then be surprised as it falls apart and dissolves,” Freda says. Her hallmark repetition of circular patterns takes on new meaning in the paintings for this show, as the year of the rooster returns in a full cycle of the Chinese zodiac. Freda, who often includes text and collage elements in her paintings, has also begun to include more palette-knife work to make her paintings looser and more textured.

“During the past 12-year cycle, I’ve gazed outward and painted about endangered species, contemplated global warming and the complexities of unsustainable relationships in our world,” Freda says. “The return of the rooster brings my awareness back to the farm where we live and our common barn-yard chickens.”  —Mackenzie McCreary

contact information
505.986.1156
www.giacobbefritz.com

This story was featured in the May 2017 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art  May 2017 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

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