All the Presidents

With ALL THE PRESIDENTS, Drew Friedman took up an audacious challenge. He set out to depict these figures in a new way. These include some whom we become familiar with as children and see practically every day of our lives. The result is some of the strangest and fantastic portraits he’s ever produced. These aren’t works of political satire. His agenda is set by what he sees, and as an artist, he’s a die-hard independent. At first glance, there’s something weird and shocking about his George Washington. Taking another look, you realize there is nothing grotesque about it..In every school book, on our money, carved into mountains Washington’s face is smooth.And it’s so ubiquitous, it barely registers. He’s our pasty-faced irritated Mona Lisa, Friedman adds just a few wrinkles. and this infusion of reality is radical enough to be disorienting. He takes genuine delight in his subjects’ otherness, His James Buchanan is like some creature that lumbered in from Oz. Martin Van Buren is a goblin pulled from the deep. He subverts viewers’ expectations of not only what they look like, but how they expect he’d draw them. The Nixon portrait is especially rich—weirdly perched atop hands clasped as if in prayer, his countenance is a godhead of smug avarice. But it eschews the cliched grotesqueries; he’s not a monster made of jowls, nose and glower. Making him appear relatively normal is a more interesting choice, and it takes a moment for the sinister aspect to come to the forefront. Friedman’s technical ability is absolutely astonishing here. ALL THE PRESIDENTS IS enthralling, eerie and completely entertaining.