Erik Frydenborg was born in Miami, Florida, and grew up in rural York County, Pennsylvania. He holds a BFA from MICA in Baltimore, MD, and an MFA from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA. Frydenborg has held solo exhibitions at Starr Suites, Brooklyn, NY, The Pit, Glendale, CA, Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, IL, Albert Baronian, Brussels, BE, The Suburban, Oak Park, IL, and Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles, CA. Recent group exhibitions include Slipper at Personal Space, Vallejo, CA, Models at Bel Ami, Los Angeles, CA, Chanterelle at ASHES/ASHES, New York, NY, Unstuck in Time at Pasaquan, Buena Vista, GA, and Domestic Air Bag at Pio Pico, Los Angeles, CA. Frydenborg’s work has been reviewed in Artforum, FlashArt, and The Los Angeles Times, among other publications. From 2017 through 2019, Frydenborg was a partner in the cooperative artist-run Los Angeles gallery AWHRHWAR. Frydenborg has participated widely in exhibitions staged at artist-run spaces, and has written essays on peers such as Amanda Ross-Ho and Sterling Ruby. His work is in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and public collections of the Ogunquit Museum of Art, Ogunquit, ME. Erik Frydenborg lives and works in Los Angeles.
Frydenborg's process involves sourcing and deconstructing graphics and drawings from discarded print material, such as academic diagrams of mechanical and natural systems. He digitally scans and manipulates these images into warped revisions that defy their original informative intentions. These adapted illustrations are then meticulously carved from wood, evoking forms that suggest weapons, hallucinatory vessels, or mythic totems. Using stencils, Frydenborg hand-paints the altered diagrams onto the sculptures' surfaces, creating intricate patterns reminiscent of tattoos or costume makeup.
The sculptures' palettes of pastel and fluorescent hues recall the design aesthetics of mass-manufactured products, contrasting with the archaic nature of their woodcraft, which echoes handmade toys and folk art from Frydenborg's pastoral upbringing. His work examines the instability of knowledge over time, where once-reliable information becomes elastic and subject to metamorphosis. Through his sculptures, Frydenborg visualizes this condition, transforming decontextualized data into cryptic abstractions that appear stretched and suspended in motion, disorienting the viewer's perception of time and creating a dialogue between the familiar and the futuristic.