David Fried


David Fried is an American interdisciplinary, contemporary artist.
His stated conceptual focus is on dynamic non-linear and interdependent relationships found in nature and society, juxtaposed with the human desire to control, manipulate and predict outcomes. Fried’s works have been exhibited in the US, Europe, Asia and Australia. Major works have been included with artists Rebecca Horn, Robert Rauschenberg and Alexander Calder in an extensive traveling museum exhibition; "Drehen, Kreisen, Rotieren", and in "Genesis—The Art of Creation" with Joseph Beuys, Antony Gormley, Bruce Nauman at the Zentrum Paul Klee, Switzerland. His works are in international collections including a commissioned interactive installation on permanent view in Germany’s comprehensive kinetic art collection at the :de:Kunstmuseum Gelsenkirchen|Kunstmuseum Gelsenkirchen. Fried first became known to the New York established art world in the early 1980s through his activities as a painter in the street art group AVANT, who alongside the then emerging artists Richard Hambleton, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquait began the post-graffiti street art movement in NYC. His efforts are mainly concentrated in Europe since relocating his studio from NYC to Düsseldorf in 1989.

Early life and development

Born to low income parents in Manhattan, Fried grew up in a small apartment with opaquely curtained windows. He began drawing at the age of seven, and states his motivation for exploring art was "to express my own windows on the world". In 1972 at the age of ten, he was accepted to the Art Students League of New York as one of the few minors in the institution's history, and studied oil painting in the Isaac Soyer class. His earliest influences were painters like Rembrandt, Dali and Yves Tanguy. His earliest works show experimentation in a range of styles with a common subject matter about the nature of being. In 1974, he mounted his first public solo exhibition of 20 oil paintings in Rockefeller Plaza. His artistic influences widened through his acquaintances with jazz musicians, philosophers, scientists and pioneers of abstract expressionism. After attending the school of Music and Art, in 1979 he pursued his art career as a painter with a focus on human dynamic relationships, portrayed in dysfunctional urban scenes. In 1981, Fried co-pioneered a guerilla street art collective named AVANT, leading to over forty gallery exhibitions of his work between 1981 and 1984 in SoHo, the East Village and the Lower East Side. In 1985, Fried began to investigate the photographic medium and its artistic potential from a painter’s perspective. To explore the highly technical medium, he freelanced at several NY photo labs to learn and use their facilities for his own artworks. In 1989 he moved his studio and own color photo labor to Düsseldorf, Germany. There he began developing a form of the old Gum bichromate technique—a process that makes artist-pigments photosensitive—with which he produced six years of large-scale photographic paintings. In the late 1990s, he expanded his artistic oeuvre into a multidisciplinary approach employing sculpture, interactive objects and photographic works. By 1996, he began his research into the color photogram and interactive art. According to an interview from 2001, it took Fried two years to amass the tools and skills necessary to create his first multimedia interactive work. In 1998, he publicly exhibited his first interactive "Self Organizing Still-Life" sculpture at the art fair ":de:Art Forum Berlin|Art Forum Berlin".
By 2000, there is no more imagery of the human form to be found in his work. His earlier philosophical focus on human interdependent dynamic relationships is reduced to their intrinsic qualities as such, and how various manifestations are both initiated and experienced on the global scale. His various works since the turn of the century also became more symbolic and minimalist in appearance. In 2003 his analogue photography series of "rainscapes" began, in 2004, a sculpture series titled "Stemmers", and in 2009 he commenced a series of stainless steel sculptures titled "Globalexandria". In 2012 he first employed computerized generative graphics combined with physical interactive kinetic objects that merge the distinctions between the "real" and the "virtual" in one artwork.

Solo exhibitions (selection)

Art Stage Singapore, :de:Art Forum Berlin|Art Forum Berlin, :de:Art Frankfurt|Art Frankfurt, Art Brussels, Scope New York, Scope London, Art Cologne, Art Basel,
Scope East Hampton, Wynward Miami, Paris, Paris Photo, Melbourne Art, Photo London, Art.Fair Köln, Liste Berlin, Liste Köln.

Collections