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The New Contemporary Art Magazine

Marina Fridman’s Celestial, Hand-Drawn Installation

Handcrafted with charcoal pencils and sticks on white paper, Marina Fridman's massive installation "Omniscient Body" is actually a single, enormous drawing. The piece, at 74-feet-by-14-feet, is installed at the Fosdick-Nelson Gallery at Alfred University, as part of the artist's MFA thesis exhibition. The celestial forms offer a chance "to approach the celestial body of Mars at their own scale, to be towered over by one of the rings of Saturn, and to look up at planet Earth and the Moon as though from a great distance."


Handcrafted with charcoal pencils and sticks on white paper, Marina Fridman‘s massive installation “Omniscient Body” is actually a single, enormous drawing. The piece, at 74-feet-by-14-feet, is installed at the Fosdick-Nelson Gallery at Alfred University, as part of the artist’s MFA thesis exhibition. The celestial forms offer a chance “to approach the celestial body of Mars at their own scale, to be towered over by one of the rings of Saturn, and to look up at planet Earth and the Moon as though from a great distance.”



“My hand-drawn installation ‘Omniscient Body’ invites the audience to be enveloped in space, to approach the celestial body of Mars at their own scale, to be towered over by one of the rings of Saturn, and to look up at planet Earth and the Moon as though from a great distance,” she tells us. “Spanning 75 feet by 14 feet, this work is entirely hand-drawn using charcoal pencils and compressed charcoal sticks on white paper. From afar, the trompe l’oeil style drawings appear convincingly three-dimensional. Upon close examination, however, one can see the thousands of pencil marks that make up the images. Even from the seemingly empty space enveloping the planets emerge the gestural marks that make up the texture of the drawn void.”

See more of her work below.


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