Surrealist artist behind armchair dies at 90

Pedro Friedeberg, an artist affiliated with the Mexican branch of the Surrealist movement and now known for his absurdist designs, including the iconic armchair, died Thursday in San Miguel de Allende. He was 90 years old, according to his New York gallery, Ruiz-Healy Art.

Friedberg’s diverse practice includes paintings imbued with dreamlike imagery and design objects that look like body parts and animals. Although often labeled a Surrealist, he bristled at being associated with the movement.

when a watt Magazine journalist mistakenly claimed to be the last Surrealist in 2024, Friedberg said, “which was a terrible mistake. I am neither a Surrealist nor the last Surrealist.” He also dislikes being labeled an artist — “It’s a terrible word,” he once told a Christie’s interviewer — and said that if his career had taken a different turn, he would have been a “spiritualist or a gigolo.”

He is best remembered for his “Handchair” design in the early 1960s, a seat that resembled a large palm. He was assigned work to a carpenter whom Friedberg knew as a friend, and the artist asked the carpenter to carve a hand. “I thought it would be fun,” Friedberg recalled in a 2017 interview. architectural digest.

The sculpture eventually became popular in Mexico. “Everyone has a Friedberg in their home,” author Déborah Holtz said in Pedroa 2022 Netflix documentary about him. “Everyone has an armchair.”

While he is still best known for the objects he designed, he also produced paintings that included arrays of birds and puzzling architectural spaces whose walls and floors were depicted with zigzag patterns.

Pedro Friedberg was born in Florence in 1936. His parents were Jewish, so the family fled to Mexico in 1940 under the threat of Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime. He later reflected on the cultural shock that continued to influence his taste for absurdism. “I was born in Mussolini’s Italy, who made all the trains run on time,” he once said. “I moved to Mexico immediately after that, where the trains were never on time, but once they started running, they would pass the pyramids.”

His father was an engineer, inspiring him to study architecture at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. After graduating, he worked with artist Mathias Goeritz, who also fled Europe for Mexico. Goeritz closely observed the work of modernist artists in his native Germany, and he brought an experimental spirit to Mexico City’s art scene that also influenced Friedberg.

Through Goritz, Friedberg went on to meet many European and American expatriates living in Mexico City, including Surrealist painters such as Alice Rahon and Leonora Carrington, and the photographer Kati Horna.

“I told my parents I was studying architecture, which was a big lie,” Friedberg told watt. “I was just hanging out at people’s houses. That’s how I met Leonora and Katie and all these fascinating people.”

Friedberg’s practice has gained wide recognition in Mexico City, where he received a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in 2009. In 2016, the Riverside Art Museum in California conducted a survey of his early work.

Later in his career he was active and productive. At a 2009 retrospective, he told new york times“I never relax. My art is my therapy, my medicine.”