Library Road Collective is happy to current Bugbee, a two-person exhibition with Sam Friedman and Josh Sperling opening October 18, 2025. The exhibition will characteristic new works by every artist, along with collaborative items created collectively by the pair.
Friedman’s ‘Cave Work’ transfer fluidly between summary and representational kinds, investigating the connection between paint, instruments, and floor, typically measured towards the dimensions of the human physique. He employs repetition and self-imposed constraints to permit likelihood and imperfection to emerge, creating works that really feel boundless and meditative. In the meantime, inside his ‘Double Bubble’ works, Sperling distills architectural kinds into pared-down vocabularies. He constructs complicated plywood frameworks, which he covers with stretched canvas and paints in daring, typically contrasting colours. The ensuing works occupy an area between portray and sculpture, picture and object. Although each artists make use of gestural, free-flowing kinds, their practices are grounded in rigorous technical consideration and ability.
Alongside kind—evident within the content material of the work and within the irregularly formed substrates that the artists make use of—coloration serves as a unifying power within the exhibition. Sperling’s refined surfaces discover chromatic interaction and optical vibration, whereas Friedman builds luminous atmospheres by gradients and freehand traces that counsel horizons, skies, or shifting gentle. In each practices, Sperling and Friedman’s palettes grow to be brokers of spatial and emotional resonance, reworking flat helps into immersive experiences.
Mirrored in each the visible and conceptual foundations of their work, Friedman and Sperling have been lifelong pals whose practices have frequently knowledgeable one another. The exhibition’s title, Bugbee—taken from the preschool the artists attended in Oneonta, New York—speaks to this formative bond and celebrates their lifelong artistic journeys, which have developed each independently and in concord with each other. In the present day, the artists stay and work in upstate New York—Friedman in Nice Valley and Sperling in Ithaca—the place the encompassing landscapes gas their shared pursuit of kinds that really feel infinite and open-ended.
The present is full with two work developed collaboratively by Friedman and Sperling, an act they’ve engaged in periodically all through their careers. In these collaborations, Friedman and Sperling’s particular person voices stay unmistakable, but their processes merge so fluidly that the outcomes really feel wholly singular—testaments to each their enduring friendship and their shared dedication to the language of postwar American abstraction.
Bugbee is on view from October 18, 2025 by January 14, 2026 at Library Road Collective.
