Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to present “Four Artists”, an exhibition that examines the work of four young artists who address the figure in surprising ways.
Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to present 4 Artists, an exhibition that brings together four emerging voices who approach the figure with unexpected strategies and distinctly personal vocabularies.
Njideka Akunyili’s large-scale works on paper negotiate the split identification between her life in the United States and Nigeria. Through a dense layering of photo-transfers—family, friends, domestic interiors—she embeds Nigerian visual memory directly into scenes of her American present. The result is not collage but a seamless interweaving in which cultural hierarchies dissolve and the duality of identity becomes a single, continuous field.
Jacqueline Cedar’s figures occupy an uncanny, psychological terrain. Standing as archetypal embodiments of emotional states, they fuse the fractured planes of Cubism with the self-reflexive mark-making of high Modernism. Her otherworldly environments feel both formalist and contemporary—a space where internal dramas unfold in real time.
Justin Craun’s portraits operate at the fault line between figuration and abstraction. His sitters confront the viewer directly, but the surrounding color and gesture have their own volatile agency—circling, destabilizing, and resisting the primacy of the face. This friction between subject and field intensifies the presence of each figure, sharpening their enigmatic expressions.
Ryan Sluggett’s heavy strokes and vibrant, near-autonomous colors move across his figures like weather systems. These painterly forces give psychological shape to otherwise incorporeal moods, generating a rhythmic, almost musical lyricism. As these chromatic gestures accumulate, the emotional undercurrents rise toward consciousness, producing a charged and visceral sensitivity.
