My core inspirations involve qualities of chance, emergent complexity, interdependent and dynamic relationships found in nature and society, coupled with our innate love of chance, underscored with the acquired urge to control, manipulate and predict outcomes.
Bio | David Fried 1962, NYC [Short]
Born and raised in New York City, the artist David Fried found his calling early on. He was accepted as the first minor ever into the adult classes at the Art Students League where he had his first chance to expand his artistic horizons. Between the age of 8 and 13, beyond mastering traditional and established contemporary styles, he painted in oil with a visionary style of his own that earned him numerous awards and public solo exhibitions as a youngster. Soon after his early departure from the academic world, he co-founded the artist‘s consortium known as "Avant", which along with Haring and Basquiat, were major contributors to the emerging New York street-art scene. His notorious illegal public paintings led to inclusions in dozens of gallery exhibitions in SoHo and the East Village throughout the early to mid 80‘s.
Fried‘s fascination with specifically human dynamic relationships present in his early figurative paintings led to deeper insights into complex relationships in general, which soon crystallized as the conceptual core for all his forthcoming artistic endeavors. His hands-on research led to a panache of traditional, state of the art and invented techniques. He simultaneously pursued his art and studied philosophy, primitive mythology, life sciences and aspects of technology and mass media in our cultures.
In 1989, shortly before the Berlin wall came down, Fried moved his studio to Germany where he sought Europe‘s entwined cultural distinctions and social dialogue to inspire and explore his increasingly scientific and philosophic brand of art. There his work developed from painting and photography into his own morphology of techniques and processes such as ‘light sensitive paint’, ‘interactive granite’ and sculpture, to depict and fabricate his conceptual explorations. Since then his artwork has followed several distinct avenues that are disparate in actualization yet united in sensibility.