“My work explores the complexity of social and political relationships and human behavior in which the memories and factual narratives about historical and symbolic figures can shift and be revised across time. As part of my practice, I use performance and interventionist actions to challenge and transgress physical and mental boundaries. In addition, my video installations examine the tension between the material and the immaterial. My works with performances, videos, installations and sculptures are characterized by elaborately layered stories, translating and conveying the poetic moments between reality and fiction. My diverse visual language is engaged in an ongoing conversation with history and memory.”
Angela Freiberger began to make marble objects in the early 1990s. Using Carrara stone from Italy and pink marble from Portugal, she sculpts receptacles or recipients; replicas of utilitarian objects such as urinals, bathtubs, vessels, and large and small bowls. Freiberger utilizes her own body as a model from which to cast a variety of body parts, such as the back, stomach, the head, etc., thus transforming the sculptures into an extension of her body. Sometimes, the objects contain carved marks of the artist’s hands, fingers, or toes, as signatures of the artist imprinted on the stone. As Angela’s process of interaction with the pieces develops, she continues to emphasize more her relation with the sculptures and performances as extensions of her own physicality.
“My work investigates the idea of ‘body’, in which the sculpture and other media suggest and become an extension of my body. The sculptures represent and contrast the finitude of the human body.”
Angela Freiberger pieces are part of the Joao Sattamini collection on display at the Contemporary Museum of Art in Rio de Janeiro, as well as the Gilberto Chateaubriand collection at the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro. She was included on 1997, in the VIth Havana Biennial with an installation consisting of plaster tombstones imbedded with photographs of relatives who perished in WWII. Angela Freiberger work was featured in the Sculpture Magazine/April, 2005, Art Nexus, Arte el Dia and Art Slant in 2009 & on the cover of Veja Rio.
Angela was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Freiberger received her Bachelor in Fine Arts from the School of Fine Arts at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in 1976. She also studied computer graphics at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1986. While still living in Brazil, she embarked in numerous adventures and journeys, producing performances, videos and interactive works in different places in the world, from Macapá in the Northeast of Brazil to New York City, and later France, England and other countries in Europe.
For the last ten years Angela has been living in New York City. She moved to New York in 2004 to pursue her Masters in Fine Arts at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. She graduated in 2007. Angela continues to produce and exhibited her artwork. In 2011, she received her Permanent Residency in the United States through her work as an international artist.
In 2009, Freiberger performed with Marina Abramovic at her solo exhibition, “The Artist is Present,” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2010, Angela received the Senior Fellowship from Terra Foundation for American Art in Europe (Giverny, France). In 2012, she participated at a residency in Hasselt, Belgium, “Hotel de Immigrantes 2, Cosmopolitan Stranger,” which paralleled Manifesta 9.
See also: Resume.pdf
