s Angeles-based artist Frederika Roeder is presenting a new series, Scapes, opening January 15th at LAAA’s Gallery 825 in Los Angeles. Frederika uses her lustrous abstract landscapes to describe geography, place, new horizons, and the majesty of the natural world, through the lens of biological narrative.
Primarily influenced by the Southern California landscape, the series also includes two images inspired by the artist’s residency in the Central Italian Alps. Thematically, Frederika stresses the importance of conservation and the protection of fragile coastal areas, as well as the beauty and power of the ocean.
All eight acrylic works reference different aspects of nature. In Frederika’s “Twin Harbors” she refers to the placid, dark blue water of Catalina Island’s harbors and the precious marine life teeming beneath the surface. The upper quadrant of the painting references the California landscape rimming the harbor. In “Sundown at the Wedge,” the raw power of an iconic Newport Beach surf spot and the dazzle of the sun’s heat on the water exudes the artist’s awe at the beauty and danger of the high surf beach.
More serene are images depicting the Laguna Beach area, and its pristine, clear green bay. “Plaza A La Playa” is a personally cherished spot, a wide and open beach with a surf break extending both north and south. A translucent blue vertical band runs through the center of the piece, a reference to velocity, speed, and the constant, inevitable motion of life.
As an artist, Frederika uses vertical bands, bars, and narrow pinstripe lines in her work. Their use hints at both physical thrills and action, the momentum of nature, and the human desire for speed, so evident in Southern California’s extreme sports subcultures from surfing to snowboarding, to street cars and racing. Her paintings often include horizon lines as well, depicting seemingly endless vistas of beaches and seductive waves, or lines of heat above a desert highway.
In Scapes, the artist’s two paintings depicting the landscape of the Italian Alps depart from the local region and its dynamics but are nonetheless influenced by it. These two paintings present a new world as seen through the eyes of a Southern Californian. “Cividate Camuno” is additionally influenced by the technology of place mapping, creating a patchwork of lush green fields and forests beyond a vineyard in the Alps. “Val Camonica” references the influence of the Mediterranean and Roman ruins in the region, indicating an empire’s attempt at domination in a wild land.
Regardless of the actual location which inspires Frederika, she creates powerful visuals that invite exploration and experience, both through viewers’ own lives and the artist’s more personal story. Her works transcend place with a message of universal hope for, and awe in, Frederika’s treasured universe of the natural landscape.
Exuding a positive energy, she embraces the idea that artists must create the means to motivate viewers to self-exploration, compassion, and empathy for both human beings and the earth on which they reside. Her passionate hope is that her work will “transcend the particularity of an abstract landscape” and bring those viewing it home, to their “treasured place...[one] that deeply resonates for them.”
While Scapes is firmly rooted in a Southern California aesthetic, it is also a powerful message of hope for the natural world, exuding emotion and purpose.
About the Artist
Frederika B. Roeder is an abstract artist based in Los Angeles. She began her career as a painter in the 1970s, a fourth generation Southern Californian whose work follows the paths of both Minimalism and the Light and Space Movements.
An inveterate athlete with a background as an extreme skier and competitive surfer in her youth, Frederika’s fine art is primarily based in nature, from desert to shore, as she expresses a lifetime love of the outdoors and a visual synthesis of emotion, place, and experience. Painting with both brush and palette knife, she primarily works in mixed media, including oil, acrylic, gels, resin, and molding paste, and considers herself a “colorist who enjoys a minimal use of color” in individual works.
The exhibition opening will take place January 15th from 10 to 5 at Gallery 825; it will be available for viewing by appointment through February 18th.