About Grandpa Pfriender

Andrew "Grandpa" Pfriender was born in New York in 1909 and trained as a self taught artist in the later part of his life. The majority of his work was done in the 70s and 80s and varies widely in content and medium. The material nature of much of Pfriender’s works could only be described as inclusive (imagine a salad made with all the ingredients in a salad bar). Pfriender collected and utilized every sort of scavenged and found material - broken glass, yarn, scraps of wood, metal, and plastic, random discarded hardware. In the same way that his life experiences and encounters gave rise to paintings, he collected these materials and shapes that had no significance on their own but to him they suggested meaning and form that fed his development of an image and vivid narratives. Two of Grandpa Pfriender's art works are currently in the permanent collection of the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore and his work was part of a group exhibition in 1986 curated by Meyer Raphael Rubinstein at PS 122 in NYC called Wild Surmise.