Frida Escobedo

Exhibited by Friedman Benda

Material Stainless steel, nickel-finished ball chains

Dimensions 83 × 432 × 96 cm

Status Vetted

About the Work

Creek Bench, by internationally acclaimed Mexican architect Frida Escobedo, reduces themes of monumentality, materiality and identity to their most nimble expression. As with her architectural projects, Escobedo’s work embraces artisanal building traditions and strips modernism from its rigor. Rather than focusing on programmatic efficiencies, she is most concerned with interaction and use. Instead of pretending to overcome impermanence she proposes an architecture of the intimate and the instant.

A perfect example of her design philosophy is her Creek Bench, which takes its name from a short film by Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, shot in 1974. In the film, Mendieta drifts nude in a natural pool with glimmering water running against her body. The light in the film has a metallic quality, reflected in Escobedo’s delicate nickel ball chain that overflows from the steel structure of the bench, in an honest, almost effortless poetic merger between material, moment and body.

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