OSLO: Frieda Toranzo Jaeger

At the center of Frieda Toranzo Jaeger’s exhibition at Den Frie is a new monumental work composed of interconnected panels that function simultaneously as painting, sculpture, and stage. This three-dimensional, modular painting—which also incorporates embroidered motifs—continues the artist’s ongoing investigation of Western painting traditions, late-capitalist ideology, and technological phantasms. Toranzo Jaeger’s approach to painting is both conceptual and political. She employs the medium as a tool for collective, critical liberation from binary constructs and systems of power.

Many of Toranzo Jaeger’s works draw on motifs such as cars, tools, and spacecraft—symbols of humanity’s ambition to dominate nature and conquer the cosmos. Yet these works are not celebrations of technological progress. Instead, they investigate the friction between humans and machines, that today include social media, selfies, and artificial intelligence. What happens when our desires are absorbed by technology and return to us in alienated form? How can we reclaim agency?

Her paintings dismantle modernism’s blind faith in the future by unfolding alternative visions—shaped by queer desire and liberated from the shadows of colonialism.

Frieda Toranzo Jaeger (b. 1988) lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico. She was educated at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg.