Basic Screen

Dan Friedman was a prolific graphic designer and furniture maker, whose work posed a radical challenge to conventional design practice. Following an early training in modernist graphic design, Friedman’s typographic experiments, high-profile collaborations with artists and gallerists, social activism, and genre-bending works of assemblage established his career as one of the most dynamic and transgressive in the history of American design. This screen represents an important shift at the start of the 1980s, when Friedman was moving away corporate graphic design towards a practice grounded more in urban experience and experimentation, finding inspiration in the downtown clubs and galleries of New York City, and developing friendships with artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, as well as fashion designer Willi Smith. Basic Screen is a rare early example of Friedman’s furniture design and is in fact his first ever folding screen (a design typology for which he became particularly known). The screen incorporates many of Friedman’s most significant surface techniques from this period, including the use of spray paint, vivid color banding, and dramatic cut-outs—demonstrating references to postmodernist graphic design and post-punk New Wave graphics.