St. Louis, Missouri, USA, 1965.

Friedman studied graphic illustration at the University of Washington in St. Louis. He got his BFA in 1988 and an MFA in Sculpture at the University of Illinois, Chicago, in 1990.

As a conceptual artist, he works with a variety of media including sculpture, painting, drawing, video and installations. For over 20 years, he has been investigating the relationship between the viewer, the object and the “intermediate space”, bringing humour, childish amazement and philosophical problems to his works. With the object of art as the starting point, he uses everyday materials that he comes across and which the onlooker can easily understand. The artist’s intention is to attract the viewers magically towards simple beauty and then invite us to investigate further. He uses the artistic experience as a context to open up people’s minds to new ways of seeing and thinking. To do so, he has developed a circular rationale: a way of investigating the object and reducing it to a central understanding of its metaphor. He connects with the audience, with their daily lives and with social and philosophical constructions. Once this task has been done, he returns to the object again.

He uses materials like polystyrene, aluminium foil, paper, clay, wire, plastic and hair. Working autobiographically, he uses meticulous, painstaking methods to recreate apparently random elements of his life. In each piece, he pays obsessive attention to detail, especially in the response from the objects that surround it.

He lives and works in Northampton, Massachusetts.