ZIPORA FRIED
B. 1963
Zipora Fried moves fluidly between drawing, sculpture, and photography, often synthesizing different types of media in one work, and presenting discreet bodies of work together in unexpected ways. Her work meditates on the relationship between the surface presence and the subconscious, and the potential of the artist’s hand to create and negate shape and form. The boundary between sculpture and drawing is deconstructed, as quotidian objects are transformed and divorced from their original functionality. Layers of line, color, and material build upon one another, occluding rational meaning for a phenomenological experience. Nancy Princenthal writes, “Perhaps the most accurate way to describe her variously slippery objects is to say that all are everything: landscapes are portraits, and fully abstract; images are objects, none of which quite stand still.”
Process and endurance are fundamental themes of Fried’s practice. Her meticulously crafted sculptures and drawings are the cumulative effort of lengthy, labor-intensive processes, which form a singular “monument.” Lush colored pencil drawings, worked on over a period of months, are at once dense and contemplative, purifying and serene. Fried says, “There are moments with images where they affect you before you can think. I’m looking for that moment.”
Zipora Fried (b. Haifa, Israel) studied at the Academy of Applied Arts, Vienna. Recent exhibitions include As the Ground Turns, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York (2019); (wordless) at Small Editions, New York (2017); Late October, On Stellar Rays, New York, NY (2016); and Zipora Fried: Some Things Have Meaning, Others Don’t, Marfa Contemporary, Marfa, TX (2015). Her work can be found in the Austrian Government’s Permanent Collection of Contemporary Art; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; The Jewish Museum, Vienna, Austria; Magasin 3, Stockholm, Sweden; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. She studied at the Academy of Applied Arts, Vienna, and currently lives and works in New York.