Martha Friedman is a sculptor whose work explores the tension between the mechanical and the bodily, often through labor-intensive processes that merge material investigation with wry conceptual clarity. Based in New York City, she creates objects that press on systems of language, anatomy, and abstraction—casting rubber, concrete, glass, and metal into forms such as bolts, nuts, testicles, and seeds.
Her work has been exhibited at the Henry Art Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU, and The Kitchen. She is represented by Jessica Silverman Gallery (San Francisco) and Broadway Gallery (New York).
Alongside her studio practice, Friedman is a dedicated educator. She teaches sculpture at Princeton University, where she collaborates across disciplines including material science, choreography, and psychoanalysis. She has also taught at The Cooper Union, Yale, Wesleyan, and Rutgers.
Friedman’s work operates where the body meets the machine—where abstraction becomes sensual, systems grow unstable, and materials testify to their histories, revealing what they’ve been made to endure.