Kansas Again

At the vibrant age of 81, Larry Friedberg stands as both an artist and an architect of his own creative destiny. From the tender age of 5, he embarked on a journey fueled by an innate passion for creation. Now, with decades of experience shaping both blueprints and brushstrokes, Larry unveils a collection of previously unseen artworks, crafted over 5 years from 1996 to 2001. These pieces, untouched by public eyes until now, resonate with the timeless wisdom of a life well-lived. Each stroke, every choice of color and texture, carries the weight of years spent honing his craft, blending the precision of architecture with the fl uidity of artistic expression. Accompanied by titles that serve as gentle guides, Larry’s artworks beckon viewers to journey through the rich tapestry of his imagination. As he extends an exclusive invitation to art enthusiasts and collectors, he off ers the chance to bring these exceptional works into personal spaces, where they stand as testaments to a legacy forged through dedication and experience. For those eager to explore the intersection of art and architecture in Larry’s ongoing creative endeavors, a digital platform awaits, bridging the gap between physical and virtual realms. Here, viewers can connect with his latest works, ensuring that the journey of artistic expression continues to evolve with each passing year. Embrace this extraordinary opportunity to own a piece of Larry Friedberg’s legacy, where the lines between art and architecture blur, and the beauty of a lifelong passion fi nds its fullest expression.

The Art of Larry Friedberg

Gary J. Coates

Professor of Architecture, and

Victor L. Regnier Distinguished Faculty Chair

Kansas State University

Manhattan, Kansas

In 1435 Leon Battista Alberti published his landmark book, Della Pittura (On Painting). which codified rules for the construction of linear geometric perspective, a technique of painting invented by architect Fillippo Brunelleschi some ten years earlier. Alberti characterized painting based on this radical new technique as the creation of a "window on the world. Perspective revolutionized art and architecture, and even culture itself in the Western world for the next five hundred years. Then suddenly, at the beginning of the 20th century, a modernist revolt against perspectival art emerged, led by artists such as Picasso, Braque, Kandinsky, Malevich and Klee. The multi-perspectival, and even nascently aperspectival, abstract art they pioneered took hold in the west because it proved capable of expressing radically new understandings about the nature of space, time, matter, light, the living world and reality altogether, including the inner reality of both self and world. It is within this tradition of abstract modemist art that Larry Friedberg's paintings must be understood and appreciated.

Even though his art expresses a sense of depth because of his use of richly layered colors, and create the impression that one is looking into other worlds because of his use of architectural frames within his paintings, Friedberg's pictorial spaces are not in any way like Alberti's perspectival spaces. Rather than being windows looking out toward recognizable worlds.

Friedberg's paintings invite us to enter into paradoxical, non-perspectival worlds that are realms for the feeling-heart, places where the imagination can freely wander and dwell.

In this sense, the abstract yet strangely naturalistic worlds of Fnedberg's paintings are reminiscent of the richly colored pictorial spaces created in the last century by Paul Klee. As in the case of Klee's art, Friedberg's paintings are not entirely abstract nor are they unrelated to the outer world. Subdivided into one or more strong horizontal lines, Friedberg's paintings suggest that we might be looking at representations of various kinds of natural landscape. In painting No. 016, for example, the horizon line is strongly reinforced by the artist's use of a luminous blue field for the overarching sky and a ruddy red plane for the underlying earth. Gentle ripples on the horizon line suggest the presence of landforms, a body of water and perhaps some kind of crystal city or strange snow covered mountains. And vet, even in this most conventional of Friedberg's paintings, there is a rectangular window carved out of the red ground, opening up a window into a gridded

Because of the presence of this unexpected picture within the painting, the abstract yet comfortably familiar red and blue landscape that we first perceived becomes in the end ambiguous and altogether strange to us. The painting is not what it first appears to be. Unanswerable questions arise within it. What kind of world is framed by this window, and why is such a mysterious view opened up within the heart of this painting? The familiar and known suddenly become the unfamiliar

By entering into in this painting we become aware of the fact that we ourselves are creating our own perceptions and meanings, that we co-creating this work of art as our own lived experience. This same participatory process of contextualization and re-contextualization, of making the strange familiar and familiar strange, is a consistent theme throughout all of Friedberg's paintings and is an important part of the mystery and magic of his lovingly made and carefully

While techniques such as the use of abstraction and the framing of worlds within worlds are used to create an ambiguous sense geometrically ordered but non-perspectival space, Friedberg's use of richly hued, organic colors always grounds us in remembrances of the sensuous materiality and beautiful aliveness of the natural world. Earth, air, fire, and water, as well as the fecundity of green nature, are present in every painting, not in the form of realistic representations of recognizable natural elements, but, rather, as felt qualities and living presences. One might say that Friedberg's paintings present to us images of the inneress of nature while at the same time inviting us to experience the innerness of our own

Through the visual poetry and almost childlike innocence of Friedberg's naturally grounded yet abstract art it becomes possible for us to experience inside and outside, self and world, nature and human nature as parts of a larger, more inclusive and ultimately mysterious whole. In this sense Larry Friedberg is an artist who is involved in the creation of a form of art that is capable of evoking an experience of the unseen yet all pervading spiritual reality of both self and