Maria Friberg

Maria Friberg creates male subjectivities that say "no" to traditional male power, therefore suggesting a different kind of relationship to femininity. She is best known for photographic work that features male models dressed in business suits. Usually perceived as symbols of power, Friberg’s suits, however, seem to function more as protective armor to cover up insecurities and homoerotic tendencies in men.

Friberg’s video blown out of a lone nude man bobbing up and down in a turbulent sea obliquely references the larger-than-life masculinity of the Marlboro Man commemorated so brilliantly by Richard Prince in his postmodern productions of masculinity. Rather than focusing on mechanisms of representation like artists in the 1980s, however, Friberg tends to emphasize the possibility of vulnerability and anxiety in her male protagonists.

For the past ten years Friberg’s work has participated in a broader cultural discourse examining the uniformist conception of heterosexual masculinity that until recently served as a norm against which images of women were discussed. Presented as a seamless cultural phenomenon in this way, masculinity itself was rarely rendered problematic and analyzed as such. Challenging traditional views of gender and believing in a more fluid model, in which masculinities and femininities are located on one continuum rather than at opposing poles, Friberg subscribes to the view that masculinity is culturally constructed and performative like femininity. Her work suggests how a certain representation of masculinity might link to the feminine. This overlapping sensibility expressed in her still and moving pictures throws into question the oppositions along which femininity and masculinity are still being defined today. Consequently, while Friberg’s earlier work is ostensibly about masculinity it is also centrally concerned with female subjectivity, which has become an equally undeniable theme in works like Painted View and her most recent large-scale photographic series, Still Lives.

Andrea Inselmann
Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art
Cornell University, Itacha