" An apartment bathed in a dense yellow light, like a sepia photograph, a velvet green armchair in a corner of the room, a Tiffany lamp hanging from the ceiling, a black lace blouse that one might believe forgotten in a half-opened closet, scattered with faded roses... Léah Friedman has a talent for narrating the spaces she inhabits.
Artist, curator, storyteller, scenographer, she takes on multiple roles and blurs the boundaries between exhibition and theater stage to engage us in her immersive stories.
After a year at the Gobelins school, where she studied animation, she completed a bachelor's degree in fine arts before going on to study scenography at the Pavillon Bosio. Her initial training makes drawing one of her preferred mediums. Through the use of clear lines, executed quickly, she brings characters in motion to life, as if captured in the moment.
For the exhibition Le Lièvre, Mouchi et la Gattora, Léah Friedman depicts the love triangle formed by surrealist artists André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Leonor Fini, and Stanislao Lepri in Monaco during the 1940s.
Her drawings of hybrid bodies and beings, painted on the walls and inspired by the iconography of the three artists, enrich her narrative as we walk through it. Taking their passion as her subject, she seizes the residual emotional charge of the places and stages the intimacy of the trio in an apartment transformed into an exhibition space. This space, as if haunted by their ghosts, invites the spectators to physically experience this narrative, playing between fiction and reality. The objects found there, either antique or created by the artist, bear traces of the past: standing in the middle of the room, her fabric and metal folding screen is covered in orange rust, as if forgotten many years ago by its former owners.
Storytelling is a constant in her work, which she experiments with through group exhibitions.
In Henriette (March 2022, Villa Henry, Nice), Léah Friedman brings to life the house that hosts the project. The house becomes an entity in its own right, taking the form of Henriette, a fictional female character who would have lived there. She interweaves works of art, archives of the place, furniture and discourse, each making sense in relation to the others, becoming the memories of this heroine.
Le Chemin des cendres (September 2022, Pavillon Bosio) also reflects this practice of using the location as a support for memory. This collective exhibition is composed of the traces and residues of the performances that took place there. Cleared of any human presence, abandoned, the space is invaded by vegetation running to the ceiling, like a ruin in which nature reclaims its rights.
Through her exploration of memory and the interplay between real and fictional entities, the artist evokes an intimate and engaging resonance in viewers. Léah Friedman invites us to immerse ourselves in a world where narration becomes an experience in itself, leaving us captivated by the multiple facets of her artistic work. "
- Pauline Schweitzer, art critic specialized in contemporary art, co-founder of the "Jeunes Critiques d'Art" collective.