Claudia Doring Baez | My Brother's Mind

Friedrichs Pontone is pleased to present My Brother's Mind, Claudia Doring Baez's first exhibition with the gallery.Inspired by the 1975 Italian film The Night Porter and her late brother's photography, Doring Baez portrays expressionistic mastery and provocative sequences. 

With the lust of hopeless romantics, we pursue the dead, trying to enter from all angles, seeking the meaning and message that would make the kaleidoscopic truth of their lives stand still enough that we could hold it to our chests and breathe easy.

Doring Baez and her brother not only shared a common past but a collaborative relationship that flourished until his untimely death in 2016. Together they explored the act of capturing life, not only through the films they produced and directed as a team, but in their individual work, as painter and photographer.

Every Sunday at the tender ages of ten and twelve the Dorings sat with their parents at the screening room of the Cineteca National (National Movie theater) Torta de los guajolotes (a pulled pork sandwich) and Coca-Cola in hand, taking in the classic cinema of their time. Watching the work of Godard, Passolini, Fellini, Antonioni, and Cavani imprinted the indelible visual stamp that marked the siblings, teaching them the power of the visual and impressing their young minds with the aesthetics they would return to again and again.

My Brother's Mind reunites the artist with her desire to know her brother more deeply than anyone can ever know another person. She wishes to discover, in his death, the drive that led him to capture the female figure in an aesthetic very akin to many of the women from the films they saw in that cinema. The title stuns us with its quixotic flare: how can anyone enter anyone else's mind? Yet death propels us to try to do just that.

In his book, Be With, poet Forrest Gander explores the intricacies of grief after the sudden loss of his ex-wife and life partner, much the same way Doring Baez's work does here. The end of his poem, "Beckoned," speaks to this painter's quest:

At which point I conceived a realm more real than life. / At which point there was at least some possibility. / Some possibility, in which I didn't believe, of being with her once more.