Jerry M Friedman Artist Catalog | Agora Gallery

JERRY

M. FRIEDMAN

The kaleidoscopic media and the very images themselves in Jerry Friedman’s works belie the overall chromatic and shading accord. And yet, he’s not scared to throw a sharp, scarlet line into an otherwise adumbrated canvas-work, spiking the harmony and forcing the viewer to examine the finer details.

Friedman has created in metals, polymers, ceramics, and wood. But his key canvas is mylar. With a background in architecture, inspiration struck when he saw the welcoming properties of durable, archivable mylar and blueprint linens. Inks, oil paints, image transfers, pencils, charcoal, colored pencils, acrylic: all diverse media had a seat at the table. And nearly all of the media are there, sometimes in a single piece with the overflowing repaste of single graphical entities featured on one of his works.

The pell-mell but inspiring antiphony of his native New York City has been a lifelong inspiration for Friedman. With an MA in architecture, he developed a creative, paradoxical fascination with the stark order invoked by the Bauhaus school.

Friedman has worked as an educator, including seven years teaching ceramics and industrial arts in Bedford-Stuyvesant. For the last fifteen years, he has pursued his re-invigorated full-time work as an artist, which he also cites as a processory and healing endeavor. His New York City studio is where he labors for “the pieces of a puzzle to reveal a story.”

JERRY M. FRIEDMAN ON

I see myself as an artist, a craftsman, an individual, an educator, a dreamer, a conceptualist, a philosopher, or combinations of these at times. My practice reflects my fascination with twentieth century design, art, and architecture and the many years of work in architecture and academia. Early in my career, I learned by redrawing work with ink on mylar to run blueprints and I quickly realized its full potential. In retirement, I continue to explore the medium through my own language and morphology. At times I do reworks of my old drawings creating very different, improved compositions. I transfer images, use them as underlayment, or leave them faint in the background. As the work takes shape, the pieces of a puzzle reveal a story; strands reoccur, images come back to visit, layers resurface.

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ORIGINAL JERRY M. FRIEDMAN ARTWORKS ON