Kira Freije at The Approach
The top is nigh for Kira Freije’s steel sculptures. The pair of figures in fireworks (all works cited, 2022) appears to have taken the information nicely: One drapes a comforting hand on the opposite’s again as they stare out the window, complacent in one another’s firm. Or possibly, because the work’s title suggests, they’re simply having fun with the pyrotechnics collectively. In permanence of a sacred tongue, a stainless-steel and solid aluminum determine of a lady bends down on one knee, her mouth agape and her palms clasped in prayer. Is she hoping for salvation in her closing moments or just misplaced in venerative ecstasy? Oscillating between elation and trepidation, Freije’s humanoid types revel within the sort of emotional ambiguity usually present in medieval apocalypticism.
Freije’s aesthetic fascination with the Center Ages extends past the poses of her topics to the rudimentary candelabrums and censer-like lamp sculptures hanging across the room. For works like infallible Mariner, river by evening, and Autumn nightfall, Freije has manually blown glass inside a metal body in order that the fabric bulges from the gaps in its enclosure. The motif of the cage continues within the anthropomorphic figures, whose barrel-like torsos bear a robust formal relationship to Caroline Mesquita’s hedonistic steel robots. Whereas Mesquita reduces her types to mechanical shells, Freije’s intricate aluminum limbs and faces add a level of tactility (and thus humanity) to an in any other case inanimate armature. Her figures portend shades of our present flirtation with the tip instances, a reminder that such a juncture can elicit agony and solace, usually on the similar time.
— Jonah Goldman Kay
