NEW YORK, NY.- Fridman Gallery presents Beacon on the Bowery, an exhibition of new works by Azuki Furuya and Adelisa Selimbasic, created at the gallery’s residency in Beacon, NY.

Azuki Furuya graduated with an MFA from Brooklyn College in 2019. Born in Sapporo, Japan, she lives and works in Tokyo. Furuya's ingenious works on paper explore the brightness of life and the fragility of existence, with the material process itself as a form of storytelling. After drawing the composition from a photograph, she builds it up with layered bits of colored paper, meticulously sands down the surface until it is exposed like a derelict billboard, and paints inside and around the contours. Furuya then turns the discarded paper shavings into pulp, shapes it into objects she calls Ashes, and transfers the original photo onto the paper object. Each work thus completes a full cycle – from a photograph of a subject to its remembered, processed representation to a memento mori capturing the fragility of memory.

Adelisa Selimbasic graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, having emigrated to Italy from Bosnia. Her layered, luminous paintings depict an unconventional perception of the body, with distinctly feminine and not objectified sensuality. Selimbasic wants viewers to accept their own bodies as alive, authentic and perfectly normal, with all the cellulite, stretch marks, wide hips and scars. The exaggerated scale, subtle distortion of perspective, and slightly strained poses of the elongated figures recall the Mannerist style of the 16th century High Renaissance, with its emphasis on emotion over naturalistic representation. In Selimbasic’s vivid paintings the bodies are vessels that communicate histories – genetic, communal and lived.