Pedro Friedeberg: Praise of Folly

Ruiz-Healy Art is pleased to present Pedro Friedeberg: Praise of Folly. The exhibition will feature an eclectic mix of Pedro Friedeberg’s art across a fairly broad range of media including: hand woven carpets, paintings, his iconic hand-chairs, fantastical sculptures and prints. A catalogue will be available with an essay by art curator Dan Cameron. According to Cameron, "His self-identification as a Surrealist as late as 1960 appears to have had as much to do with the circles that he moved in as with a strongly held belief that the collision of art, mass culture, and technology in the 1960s would expand the thresholds of human creativity. It was probably somewhat misleading for him to refer to himself as a Surrealist. In truth, his work represents several separate strands of 20th century aesthetics tied together in a bow, from Giorgio de Chirico’s la pittura metafisica and the classic surrealism of André Breton, Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, to the geometry-based abstraction favored by such modernist giants as Wasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Georges Vantongerloo. However, any precise stylistic categorization of Friedeberg’s work is stymied by the fact that nobody makes art in quite the same way than he does."

Born in 1938 in Florence, Italy to German-Jewish parents, Friedeberg grew up in Mexico City from age three, and as a child was particularly drawn to the illusionistic representation of architectural space, both in Italian Renaissance architecture and 18th century painting, as well M.C. Escher and Josef Albers. While studying architecture at university, he met the distinguished artist Mathias Goeritz (1915-1990), who became a lifelong friend, collaborator, and immediate champion of Friedeberg’s distinctive work. Within a couple of years, Friedeberg had met Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington and was having his first one-man exhibition at Galería Diana at the age of 22.

Pedro Friedeberg is a internationally acclaimed artist. His work is found in more than 50 international museum collections including The Museum of Modern Art, NYC, Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France, and Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art, CA.

view exhibition on artsy

download exhibition catalogue