The Bonnier Gallery will be showcasing a new exhibition titled Smörgåsbord, featuring works by Swedish artists Maria Friberg & Claes Oldenburg. The opening reception will be today, Saturday, September 17th at 7 PM and the exhibition will be on view through November 12th, 2022.

In celebration of Miami’s return from summer, “Smörgåsbord” presents a selection photographs by Maria Friberg alongside drawings and sculptures by Claes Oldenburg. The works on view demonstrate the playful ways in which both artists explore representation in their respective mediums.

Friberg’s “Force Majeure”, series (pictured above) takes us into a staged world that contains real features. Each work represents an atmospheric vision of modernist architecture, depicting cityscapes crafted from everyday objects, imitating New York, Miami, Detroit, and San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Maria Friberg, Still Lives 11, 2003-2007, C-print.

In her “Still Lives” series, Friberg brings the full power of her photographic medium to bear on the question of objecthood in art history. Imaging her figural subjects in an exacting style associated with the detached observation of Northern Renaissance still life painting, Friberg collapses the historical hierarchy of artistic genres and demonstrates how forcefully pictorial structure can objectify iconographic images, even when they represent human figures.

Claes Oldenburg, Tube Supported by its Contents, 1981, paper, urethane foam, metal, vacuum cleaner hose, wood; painted with enamel.

Though toothpaste and toothbrushes would recur in various ways throughout Oldenburg’s career, another related theme was soon to emerge: that of the “Tube Supported by its Contents.” This theme involves a startling and conceptually brilliant inversion in which the soft, shapeless paste becomes the structural support for the solid tube now hovering above it.

The idea continues to occupy Oldenburg in a number of drawings between 1969 and 1973. It recurs for instance in Notebook Page #3184, “Study for Tube Supported by its Contents” (1971). In this vibrant drawing, the piece is integrated in a park-like landscape and enlarged to monumental scale. The toothpaste is now a straight rod, coiled twice near the ground where it is anchored, and the tube rises directly above it like a burning flame.

Claes Oldenburg, Notebook Page #3184, Study for Tube Supported by its Contents, 1971, felt-tip pen, ballpoint pen and colored pencil on lined notebook paper.

The enigmatic inscription “Note – projects = myself ” at the bottom tantalizingly establishes Tube Supported by its Contents as a self-portrait. Oldenburg frequently spoke of the toothpaste works as representations of himself—as an artist who “takes off his cap and oozes out his content” — and those contents supporting him. He wistfully envisioned a moment when, like an empty tube, he’d be discarded.

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