Mano Luna (rare giltwood sculpture), Circa 1970

Pedro Friedeberg   Emerging artists

There is a world where swirling and hypnotic lines intermingle to form architectural structures worthy of the Tower of Babel. This world is housed in the works of Pedro Friedeberg, architect of the imagination… Born in Italy during the reign of Mussolini, he moved to Mexico with his family from his childhood. A precocious lover of drawing and literature, he went on to study architecture at the Ibero-American University. Going against the grain of the great principles of architecture, he found in the person of Mathias Goeritz, his teacher, an excellent mentor. In 1960, he met Los Hartos, a Dadaist group who, like him, rejected political and social art. He then freed himself a little more from aesthetic diktats and created his own architectural principles, in opposition to those taught at the university, which he found far too functional. Very detailed, his psychedelic work abounds in references to several religions (he even invented a new one), to Aztec codes and to tantric writings.