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

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

To Imagine Is to Absent Oneself, 2025

Surrender to The Machine Abstraction a Form of Liberation, 2025

Anyone Could Be Here, 2025

Freedom Is Just a Category of Possibility, 2025

Turbulence Black Box Weaving Is Computing, 2025

The Soul Never Thinks Without Images, 2025

La lucha es antifascista, 2025
