By Noelle Barganier, CityHeART Creative Connect Intern
Interview conducted November 21, 2025
Erik Frydenborg is primarily a wooden sculpture artist and has been a lecturer since 2016 at Long Beach State University for the School of Art. He has held numerous solo and group exhibitions across the country, and his work has been reviewed by the Los Angeles Times and FlashArt. His work features prints that are transferred onto wood sculptures to create futuristic, fluid pieces.
CityHeART Intern Noelle caught up with Erik to learn about his influences, process, and philosophy. Check out the below Q/A, and consider your own take on material intelligence and what you might contribute to the dialogue!
1. What inspires you to create? Who are your creative influences?
Erik:
“For me making a sculpture and making artwork is a way to think about and through ideas as well as through materials. Sometimes for me I want to articulate something that is a bit beyond language. I like using sculpture as a means of doing that.
My influences are really wide ranging but in terms of sculpture in a medium that I work in the most, there are some historical artists. There is an artist named Öyvind Fahlström that I am really inspired by who was sort of a fringe kind of pop artist in the 1960’s. An Austrian sculptor named Bruno Gironcoli whose work I really like a lot made these complicated futuristic sculptures out of fiberglass and other materials.
In other realms I listen to a lot of music. I listen to a lot of Miles Davis and Brian Eno also from the early 1970’s. I’m usually pulling from a lot of different influences at a time but you know I don’t think of any of those directly when I’m making work — they’re just kinda things that float around in my head.”
2. What draws you to wood sculpture compared to other mediums? What got you into wood sculpture?
Erik:
“I’ve worked in a lot of different media and sculpture over the years. I used to do a lot of casting and mold making, especially using plastics and rubber. I started moving towards working with wood for a couple of reasons.
Number one I was interested in working with something that was a little bit more sustainable. I also was interested in it because of the way it overlaps with folk art modes. Something where I’m making these objects that are caught kind of like again — future facing or maybe even futuristic. I am interested in the contrast between something that’s sort of almost old fashioned or archaic and something that’s kind of futuristic. I kinda like to bring those two things together.
So wood is an interesting medium for that since it is so inert. I make these sculptures kinda like they are almost frozen in motion. I really like that contrast, this idea of something that is inert and appears to be fluid or in motion.”
Erik (continued):
“Recently I have been mostly working in wood. I do sometimes use other materials still. I am actually getting into working on a solo show for next year — I’m gonna probably incorporate some other materials again in addition to wood — but it has become a kind of primary language for me.
It is something that I have got more interest in the ideas of sort of building a language gradually over time within that material versus the idea of jumping around between different medias. It’s easier to kind of articulate a point of view if I sort of work incrementally within the same mode for a little while.”
3. How has your relationship with art evolved from prints and graphics to wooden sculpture?
Erik:
“Yeah I have a really strong relationship with print material and even in my current work. I was making work for a really long time that I was making collages instead of like little bits and scraps and sort of found images and graphic material. A lot of it was out of old textbooks and all sort of printed material.
I started getting interested in the idea of translating those into different formats. First I was directly translating them from little cutout collages into scanned prints and photographic prints.
And then really from there I got interested in this idea of making more dimensional or physical objects. So I started to figure out transposing these printed images onto the surface of sculptures. That’s what I do now with my work. I print images then make these digital collages of those. Now I don’t directly work with cutting images out of paper or anything like that. I mostly do work digitally but using the same material it comes from, and the same kind of sources. I’m kinda cutting those up and reconfiguring them and making new images digitally, then I output that and wind up transposing that onto the wood.
There is still a very strong relationship with print in my work.”
4. How is your creative process? Is it planned or improvisational?
Erik:
“For me now the way I take my work, it varies from each body of work. The work I have been doing for the last couple years — there is a lot of improvisation in the front end of it. A lot of invention with the work and sort of feeling until the form happens in the digital part of the stage when I’m making these images and kind of working with them in the digital space.
There is sort of a methodical execution of that in the physical medium because working the way I have been requires some planning. So there is a certain degree to which I have to kind of know how things are going to work physically.
So yeah, there is a lot of improvisation on the front end and like a long term execution on the back end.”
5. Do you struggle with artist’s block?
Erik:
“I have in the past. There have been times when I do. But I think now I don’t really because the way I make my work is generative.
One of the reasons I have been working the way I do is because my work is a form of abstraction. I am using all of these found images and reconfiguring them. The way I approach it is less like coming up with an idea and more like having to come up with a form.
The language I’ve been working in to some extent is established. So what I try to do each time I’m making a new work, I’m trying to better articulate that language. It is a benefit of working on a series — having a mode to work in. I’m not having to invent the wheel every time I’m making something.
I probably take thirty to forty images for every sculpture I wind up actually making. A bunch of preliminary sketching attempts, then going through the process of picking one. It’s not the same as artist’s block since you are just having to go through many ideas and versions of something to get the one you want.”
6. How do you use art to tell a story?
Erik:
“I don’t really think of my work as narrative in that way. I believe in material intelligence. You can embody an association with something in the world through your work and that you can have these peripheral relationships with things that you recognize.
I view my work as sort of like a processing of information. It is less about me and definitely not about telling a story of myself or really telling a story at all. It is more of an idea of what happens when information gets pulled further away from its source and how we interpret things.
My work is almost the opposite of narrative. It’s focusing on how much we think we understand something we’re looking at — but it might be further away from our understanding than we think.”
7. What projects are you working on right now?
Erik:
“I work very slowly. My work is really time consuming and methodical. I am working on some sculptures for the Frieze Los Angeles Art Fair in February. Then I’m working on the very early stages of a solo exhibition that will be in Los Angeles in November of 2026.
Right now I am really dug in on these sculptures for February. As soon as I finish that I will change gears and be working on this solo exhibit for next year.”
8. What do you struggle with most? What are your strengths?
Erik:
“I think sometimes I struggle with keeping things loose when I’m working. I think that I am a bit of a control freak in the work that I am doing now. Keeping myself open to changes is something that I always have to remind myself of.
For strengths — patience. I am pretty patient. I’m pretty methodical. The work that I am making has all these different weird phases and stages involved in it. It requires a certain amount of patience and focus to see it through. I think one of my strengths is that I am pretty persistent and I have the endurance for getting through that process.”
9. What advice do you have for artists?
Erik:
“I think my advice is to always try to see as much art as you can. The more that you look at art and are in regular viewership of other people’s work — going to galleries, museums, reading — it gets you immersed in a conversation and dialogue.
I would also say to have faith in your own vision. Even if what you do feels totally out of left field or not fitting into what you see, it can be discouraging — but I like to encourage people to think in the opposite way. The more idiosyncratic or specific your vision is, you should try to nurture it and stay with that.
Adding something new to the conversation, adding something from your particular perspective, is so valuable to the field of art as a whole.”
