Jake Fried

Jake Fried is an artist whose practice sits between drawing, painting, and experimental animation. He began as a painter, but shifted toward stop-motion when his focus became ‘the evolution of an image’, researching how meaning accumulates as a drawn surface is constantly being revised.

His films are made through a rigorous, materially specific method: Fried works on a single sheet (or surface) using ink and white correction fluid, sometimes adding gouache, collage, and even coffee. He alters the same image over and over, photographing each state frame by frame until the drawing becomes an animation that feels less drawn than grown. Individual works can take months – sometimes close to a year – and may consist of well over a thousand frames for roughly a minute of film.

That process produces Fried’s signature visual effect: images that mutate in place, constantly slipping between figure and ground, interior and exterior, recognition and overload. Titles across his catalogue – Brain Wave, The Deep End, Night Vision, Raw Data – confirm his interest in perception: attention as something that can dilate or fracture repeatedly.

The artist works without rigid pre-planning, letting the piece ‘tell’ him what should come next, aligning with a longer lineage of process-driven drawing where revision is not correction but the engine of form.

Fried’s work has circulated across art, film, and commercial contexts. His films have been shown internationally, including at Tate Modern and the Sundance Film Festival, and he has produced commissioned work for platforms and clients including Netflix, Coldplay and Adult Swim. In the auction context, his work has appeared at Christie’s, including the 2022 benefit NFT sale for MAPS.

Alongside making, Fried teaches in Boston at Massachusetts College of Art & Design and the Museum of Fine Arts, extending a practice that is, at its core, about patiently looking to see what can happen when an image is being evaluated and rebuilt, over and over again.