Artist Bio

David Fried was born in 1962 in New York City and was accepted as the first minor ever into the adult classes at the Art Students League. Soon after his departure from the academic world, he co-founded, with Keith Haring and Jean Michel Basquiat, an artists' consortium known as Avant, which was a major contributor in 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 '80s.

Though painting was his primary medium, in the early 1980s he became aware of photography and it's strength as an expressive form of art. In a pre-digital age, Fried saw the medium's potential for growth through a painter's eye. In 1989, shortly before the Berlin wall came down, Fried moved his studio to Germany where he sought Europe's historic cultural dialogue as inspiration for his increasingly scientific and philosophic artistic ideals. In Germany his work developed using a series of new techniques and processes such as "light sensitive paint" and "interactive granite" to depict and fabricate his conceptual explorations, creating his large-scale photograms and his sound-activated Self Organizing Still-life sculptures.

Soon after relocating to Europe he was offered his first major solo exhibition at Gallery Kudlek in Cologne, Germany and was later invited to use Jorg Immendorff's open studio for a one night exhibition and performance for the "Night of the Museums" in Dusseldorf. His work was highlighted in the critically acclaimed traveling museum exhibition "Kunst in Bewegung" from 2002, which included artists such as Rauschenberg, Horn, Uecker, and Calder, among others. Fried has participated in several solo and group exhibitions in galleries, art fairs and museums across Europe and America. His work can be found in many prestigious public and private collections including a permanent installation at the Stadt Museum, Gelsenkirchen in Germany. In 2008, Fried's work was shown at (and remains in the permanent collection of) the Museum Ritter, Waldenbuch, Germany, as well as the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland alongside works by Chuck Close, Jean Arp, Joseph Beuys, Antony Gormley, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Sol Lewitt, Piet Mondrian, Bruce Nauman and Marc Quinn.. He unveiled a large-scale SOS sculpture at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens in May 2008, which is on view through October 2008, and has completed various commissions throughout Europe and the United States.