Magdalena Suarez Frimkess: Ninety-six and Pissed

For nearly six decades, Magdalena Suarez Frimkess (b. Caracas, 1929) has maintained a daily practice of creating an autobiography without words. Rather than telling her story by weaving together anecdotes of the rather dramatic turns her life has taken as she moved from Venezuela to Chile and finally the United States, she has instead chosen to sculpt in clay, over and over again, a personal pantheon of cartoon deities, demi-gods and mortals who have acted as her very own Greek chorus. A painter and sculptor by training, Suarez Frimkess has invoked a cast of characters from the animated world of cartoons: Minnie and Mickey Mouse, Little Lulu, Popeye and Olive Oyl, Felix the Cat, Betty Boop and Condorito, the anthropomorphic Chilean comic strip bird known for his absurdist slap stick humor.

In 2025, after decades of sharing a Venice, California home and ceramics studio with her husband Michael Frimkess, he finally succumbed to the multiple sclerosis that he had been battling for years. Forced by circumstances to move out of her longtime home, the ninety-six-year-old artist found herself without a studio for the first time in more than half a century. Finding it difficult to restart her ceramic practice in a new context and frustrated by the tragic shift in her life, Suarez Frimkess turned to the medium of drawing which had held an important if less prominent place alongside her explorations of hand-built ceramic sculpture.

In the exhibition Magdalena Suarez Frimkess: Ninety-six and Pissed, the Library at MAF presents a selection of over thirty new drawings alongside the artist’s earlier iconic drawing Wonder Woman (2007) and a representative selection of her hand-built ceramic sculptures. Taking their cue from Wonder Woman, Suarez Frimkess’s rendition of the 2006 United States Postal Service stamp celebrating the comic book superheroine surrounded by a constellation of cartoon characters, her new drawings bring together a wide-ranging cast of “caracteres” (as she proclaims in Spanish in one of the works). Olive Oyl, Bluto, Wimpy and Popeye make appearances throughout these works; Bugs Bunny becomes part of an Egyptian hieroglyph; Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the Peanuts gang splash about in a kiddie pool while a Celtic bird gazes upon them from above.

These characters appear every which way across these drawings alongside iconographic representations of figures and designs from the pre-Columbian Moche art of Peru, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Hellenistic black pottery figures and Celtic runes in a particular Suarez Frimkess-esque illustrative mash-up that irreverently crosses genres, continents and centuries. In effect, Suarez Frimkess has used her pencils to create a kind of free-floating pictorial cocktail party in which characters and symbols move freely between different drawings chatting each other up while paying little attention to stodgy art historical boundaries or traditions. Throughout these drawings, Condorito makes repeat appearances, impishly weaving his way amongst this crowd and giving a farcical emphasis to her frustrations with his frequent and emphatic slap stick exclamation ¡PLOP!. As she has noted many times, “Condorito is my philosopher.”

For Suarez Frimkess, this isn’t simply her life’s work. The work is her life, and she has to work to live (“art is my life,” she says). At ninety-six years old and cast into circumstances beyond her control, she has taken up colored pencils instead of clay in an attempt to graphically manifest her frustration and reassert control over her life. As she will tell you, she is ninety-six and pissed off, yet her work keeps her going and the drawings of her cherished caracteres are coming along with her on the ride to keep her company.

Magdalena Suarez Frimkess: Ninety-six and Pissed is curated by MAF Director Hanneke Skerath and independent curator and writer Douglas Fogle.