Frieda Toranzo Jaeger
Impersonal Unity Tools
14 Mar – 26 Apr 2025
Bortolami

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Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, Impersonal Unity Tools, Installation view, Bortolami, New York, 2025.

Bortolami Gallery is pleased to present Impersonal Unity Tools, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.

The ten new paintings in Toranzo Jaeger’s exhibition are prompts, beckoning us to seek strategies for our collective liberation. Through tableaus of various sizes and shapes, the artist presents a series of seemingly disparate tools and events, drawing connections between static object and unfolding situation. What will occur if we neglect to pick up the sickle, hammer, or chainsaw as commercial planes fall from the sky and the ultra-rich jet into space, leaving in their wake a charred planet? The animating principle here is beyond an epistemological construction of the self, beyond identity, towards collective action: “risk rather than reflection,” as the philosopher Reza Negarestani puts it. Fantasy is as much an instrument as any you find in a toolbox, it is cinder and cement in building material alternatives.

Toranzo Jaeger is celebrated for her lavish modular paintings, often held together by hinges and eyelets. The surfaces of these polyptychs are densely layered with traditional Mexican embroidery and imagery in oil paint, culled from the briefer history of Western fine art. A certain drama unfolds in these scenes, a standoff between tradition and what is stifled under its long shadow. New forms of desire and erotics peek through at every seam in her multipartite works, literally cracking open new potentialities.

Works

Installation view of displayed artwork titled Being Gay Is No Enough

Being Gay Is No Enough, 2025

Installation view of displayed artwork titled Cute Accelerationism Communism, Because Why Is Capitalism Making Us More and More Individualistic?

Cute Accelerationism Communism, Because Why Is Capitalism Making Us More and More Individualistic?, 2025

Installation view of displayed artwork titled To Imagine Is to Absent Oneself

To Imagine Is to Absent Oneself, 2025

Installation view of displayed artwork titled Surrender to The Machine Abstraction a Form of Liberation

Surrender to The Machine Abstraction a Form of Liberation, 2025

Installation view of displayed artwork titled Anyone Could Be Here

Anyone Could Be Here, 2025

Installation view of displayed artwork titled Freedom Is Just a Category of Possibility

Freedom Is Just a Category of Possibility, 2025

Installation view of displayed artwork titled Turbulence Black Box Weaving Is Computing

Turbulence Black Box Weaving Is Computing, 2025

Installation view of displayed artwork titled The Soul Never Thinks Without Images

The Soul Never Thinks Without Images, 2025

Installation view of displayed artwork titled La lucha es antifascista

La lucha es antifascista, 2025

Installation view of displayed artwork titled Praying to The All Consuming Void of Time

Praying to The All Consuming Void of Time, 2025