Pedro Friedeberg

Artist and designer Pedro Friedeberg is known for his surrealist paintings, prints, and sculptural furniture. He was the subject of a 2009 retrospective at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. Born in Florence, Italy, to German-Jewish parents, Friedeberg and his family moved to Mexico during World War II. Enthralled by Florence’s Gothic and Renaissance architecture as well as Mexico’s Aztec ruins, he studied to become an architect; at the encouragement of his mentor, the sculptor Mathias Goeritz, he dropped out of university to pursue art. Friedeberg was a member of Los Hartos (The Fed-Up Ones), which advocated art for art’s sake and which included surrealists and Neo-Dadaists active in Mexico City including Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. Friedeberg’s most famous work, Hand Chair (1962), is simultaneously a functional piece of furniture and an absurdist object. His two-dimensional works feature psychedelic, Op art-inspired patterns, ideograms, and fantastical architectural forms.