PAINTINGS BY RACHEL FRIEDBERG: "FROM MY MOTHER'S GARDEN" (page 2)
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In My Mother's Garden, a swaddled adult figure lies in what looks as much like a baby carriage as a deck chair in the garden space. Long, pink-clad trapeze-legs hang down from the top. A male silhouette, head bowed, enters from the right. Nothing grows in the cold white light of this winter garden. All is fragmented and muted. The trapeze-legs dangle limply, forfeiting any memories of vitality, whether from a circus ad or Manet's Bar at the Folies Bergére, where we have seen these legs before.

In Second Marriage, the garden has been reduced to a speckled halo behind a couple, while to the left lies a mummy-like figure stretched out upon a spartan bed. The garden, love, perhaps a mother's protection, is in one place, lassitude and death in another. The same stretched-out, silenced figure appears in The Yellow Dress. Its bed is the garden ground itself, with the now youthful and whole trapeze figure swinging above, wearing a red, heart-shaped bikini. The contrasts between activity and passivity, entering and leaving, clearly defined forms and tremulous ones, determine the mood entirely.