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".[16] 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.[16][17] His earliest influences were painters like Rembrandt, Dalí and Yves Tanguy. His earliest works show experimentation in a range of styles with a common subject matter about the nature of being.[16] In 1974, he mounted his first public solo exhibition of 20 oil paintings in Rockefeller Plaza.[16] His artistic influences widened through his acquaintances with jazz musicians, philosophers, scientists and pioneers of abstract expressionism.[16] 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.[13] In 1981, Fried co-pioneered a guerilla street art collective named AVANT,[13] leading to over forty gallery exhibitions of his work between 1981 and 1984 in SoHo, the East Village and the Lower East Side.[10] 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.[18] In 1989 he moved his studio and own color photo labor to Düsseldorf, Germany.[3] 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.[18] 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.[1] In 1998, he publicly exhibited his first interactive "Self Organizing Still-Life" sculpture at the art fair "Art Forum Berlin".[3] 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.[1] His various works since the turn of the century also became more symbolic and minimalist in appearance.[2] 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 interactivekinetic objects that merge the distinctions between the "real" and the "virtual" in one artwork.[19]
Solo exhibitions (selection)
2013 Spheres of Influence II, SPAM Contemporary, Düsseldorf, Germany
2012 Troner Art, Stilwerk Düsseldorf, Germany
2009 Position Probable, Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney, Australia
2009 Spheres of Influence, Gallery Samuelis Baumgarte, Bielefeld, Germany
2010 West Side Philosophers Inc, "Fatal Numbers—Why count on Chance" by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. pp.1, 4, 6, 10, 36, 50, 52, cover
2009 Museum Ritter "Hommage to the Square - works from the Marli Hoppe-Ritter collection 1915 to 2009". ISBN9783884233351, pp.111, 112
2008 PBA - Public Broadcasting Atlanta, "Sculpture in Motion", Program & Interview, PBA TV-broadcast July 2008
2008 Die Gestalten Verlag, Berlin, Kirsten & Lukas Feireiss, "Architecture of Change—Sustainability and Humanity in the Built Environment", ISBN9783899552119, pp.1, 2, 311, 312
2007 Zentrum Paul Klee - Bern. Exhibition catalogue "Genesis—the Art of Creation" Curated by Fabienne Eggelhöfer. pp.50, 51, 54, 55, cover
2007 Vernissage-TV, review by solo exhibition: "Far from Equilibrium" at Sara Tecchia Gallery New York.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
