Background

Pedro Friedeberg was born on January 11, 1936, in Florence, Italy. He is a son of Heinrich Hoffman Friedeberg and Gerda Friedeberg (maiden name Landsberg).

Education

Pedro Friedeberg spent the first three years of his life in Florence, Italy. In 1939, fleeing from World War II, Friedeberg’s mother took Pedro to Mexico against his father’s will.

Upon they settled down in the country, Pedro’s mother found the job of a translator working primarily for expats, including Leon Trotsky and a writer Anna Seghers. She married a German-born Mexican Erwin Friedeberg who served in a humanitarian organization and gave his surname to Pedro.

Pedro Friedeberg developed an interest in art very early. He grew up surrounded by a variety of innovator artists and the examples of their works, such as Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco. The architecture was another passion of Friedeberg that pushed him to choose the artistic career.

After short studies in Boston, Friedeberg enrolled at the Universidad Iberoamericana in 1957. Dissatisfied by too much conventional approach to the studies that went against his own preferences in architecture, Friedeberg left the institution three years later and concentrated on painting and designing. However, while at the University, Friedeberg met Mathias Goeritz who played an important role in his subsequent career.

Career

The start of Pedro Friedeberg’s career can be counted from the early 1960s when he abandoned his university studies and got involved in the surrealist movement, first due to his colleague and friend, an artist Mathias Goeritz. It was Goeritz who encouraged young Friedeberg to pursue his professional path as an artist and helped to organize his first solo exhibitions.

Soon, Friedeberg joined the Los Hartos (The Fed-Up), the group that united such surrealist artists as Leonora Carrington and Alice Rahon among others. The debut solo show of the artist took place in 1959 at Diana Gallery, Mexico City. In less than two years, Friedeberg demonstrated his artworks in international venues, including Paris, New York City, Washington, D.C., Munich, and Lisbon. From year to year, the number and the geography of his shows increased.

Although Pedro Friedeberg once abandoned architecture, all his eccentric works have been imbued with the spirit of his sympathy to spatial organization, even the most disordered at first glimpse. His first and the best-known artwork, the furniture and sculptural composition in one, 'Hand-Chair', appeared in 1961. Since then, he has designed a huge number of its fantastical variations like tables, couches, love seats, and clocks, often featuring other parts of the human body. Friedeberg has applied his artistic talent not only as a sculptor. He has tried his hand as muralist, book illustrator, and designer as well.

Nowadays, Pedro Friedeberg lives and works in Mexico City.

Achievements

• 

  Pedro Friedeberg’s whimsical furniture objects and mystical paintings that he has created for more than five decades of career are praised by the art community and art collectors from all over the world for the boundless imagination he has inserted in each item.
  
  Friedeberg and Frida Kahlo were the only two artists from Mexico acknowledged by Andre Breton as the representatives of the Surrealist movement.
  
  Friedeberg has been a recipient of such awards as the Córdoba Argentina Biennale 2nd prize, Solar Exhibition 1st Prize, Mexico, the Argentina Engraving Triennale Prize, San Juan de Puerto Rico 2nd Prize, XI Bienaale of Graphic Works Special Award (Tokyo, Japan), and Mexico City Government Prize for cultural merit.
  
  In 1993, Friedeberg was given a title of "Artistic Creator" by the National System of Art Creators. The year 2012 provided him with the Legionaire of Number from the National Legion of Honor and Medalla de las Bellas Artes (Fine Arts Medal) from Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura (the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature).
  
  The number of the sold copies of Friedeberg's best-known work, 'Hand-Chair', run up to more than 5,000 since its first issue in 1961. His artworks are acquired by the permanent collections of Mexican and foreign art venues, including the José Luis Cuevas Museum, the New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Louvre Museum to name a few.
  
  In 2018, 'Settee' by Pedro Friedeberg was purchased at Wright Auction for $62,500.

Works

More photos

• painting

  • Obviamente noche y día

  • Síndrome de asesoría clandestina hipermetafísica

  • Valores explícitos

  • Proyecto para un nuevo aeropuerto en el Zócalo de la Ciudad de México

  • A pesar de todo

  • Indiscreciones obligatorias

  • Sieben goldene eier (Seven Golden Eggs)

  • Todo problema causa una solución y cada solución genera dos problemas

• sculpture

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • Untitled

  • Cruceros Caront

  • Sala Zebra

  • Restoran Sublime Indigestión Garantizada

  • Mesa para el bautizo del Akond of Swat

  • Pesadillas Ambivalentes del Mago de Viena

  • Cuatro acróbatas en seis posiciones II

  • Filósofo de la escuela empírica escalerística ascendente

  • Sillón fulguroso

  • Carnaval Agliarepen tiempo de catoblepas

  • El profesor de cuerdas

Religion

A son of Jewish parents, Pedro Friedeberg was brought up an atheist. He insists that he has a religion for each day of the week.

Friedeberg would like to be interred in Venice where the graves of Stravinsky and Diaghilev are.

Views

Pedro Friedeberg thinks that modern people have lost their taste for irony, sarcasm and the absurd.

Quotations: "I admire everything that is useless, frivolous and whimsical. I hate functionalism, post-modernism and almost everything else. I do not agree with the dictum that houses are supposed to be "machines to live in". For me, the house and its objects is supposed to be some crazy place that make you laugh."

"I don’t believe a house should be a “machine to live in”. I believe a house should be a space to make you laugh or to inspire you aesthetically."

"My work is always criticizing the absurdity of things. I am an idealist. I am certain that very soon now humanity will arrive at a marvelous epoch totally devoid of Knoll chairs, jogging pants, tennis shoes and baseball caps sideway use, and the obscenity of Japanese rock gardens five thousand miles from Kyoto."

"Art has died, after surrealism, there is nothing new."

Personality

Having a reputation of an eccentric person both in life and art, Pedro Friedeberg is known as the supporter of famous personalities who have been deprived of fame and fortune like a Mexican poet Pita Amor at the end of her days.

Friedeberg once said that the I Ching is a kind of tablebook for him.

Interests

• Writers

  Edward James

• Artists

  Leonora Carrington, Bridget Tichenor, Kati Horna

Connections

Pedro Friedeberg has had four wives. He lived with the third, Polish Countess Wanda Zamoyska, for twelve years. Then, he formed a family with Carmen Gutierrez. The family produced two children named Diana and David.

Father:

Heinrich Hoffmann Friedeberg

Mother:

Gerda Friedeberg

ex-wife:

Wanda Zamoyska

Wife:

Carmen Gutierrez

References

• Pedro Friedeberg Official Website