Pedro Friedeberg – Porque tú lo digas

JULY – NOVEMBER 2025

Pedro Friedeberg (Florence, Italy, 1936) is a Mexican artist who lives and works in Mexico City.

This exhibition explores three outstanding aspects of Friedeberg’s oeuvre: the architecture of dreams, the meta-references to Art History, and the proliferation of an endless array of elements. Having received formal academic training at the Faculty of Architecture at the Universidad Iberoamericana; having experienced first-hand the friendship of the Surrealist artists of his time; and having absorbed the Pop spirit of his contemporaries, Friedeberg forged a unique and recognizable style, which is manifested in the works presented here. The exhibition addresses these themes in his most recent production, created primarily during the second decade of the present century. Each work allows the viewer to experience these dimensions to a greater or lesser degree. Architectural spaces are revealed through games of perspective and fantastic environments that appear to have emerged directly from the artist’s dreams. Dissonant elements converge in a harmony that likens them to musical compositions or a symphonic performance.

Friedeberg invokes his great masters—Rubens, Ingres, and Goya—as well as the aesthetic traditions of the modern centuries from the fifteenth to the twentieth, and even those of classical antiquity, as a homage to their enduring importance and relevance in contemporary culture. Similarly, he incorporates figures and motifs from past art, recontextualizing them within his vibrant and resounding landscapes. Moreover, in this exhibition, the multiplication of figures employed solely as compositional elements evokes the infinity of time and its timeless recurrence. Ultimately, this exhibition is, without a doubt, the manifestation of Dr. Simplicissimus: the pure aesthetic delight of complexity. This character, whom Friedeberg depicted in his work, bears the full Latin name Simplicius Simplicissimus (“Supremely Simple”), and is the protagonist of the 1668 picaresque novel by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (Germany, 1626–1676).

Alejandro Sordo