Fridman Renat Arkadevich was born in 1931 in Ukraine. In 1952 he graduated from Kiev Secondary Art School. T.G. Shevchenko. Since 1953 student of the Leningrad Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. I.E. Repin, who graduated with honors from the workshop of easel graphics, Professor A.F. Pakhomov in 1959. Since 1962.-Member of the Union of Artists of the USSR. In 1971, he became assistant professor of painting at the Leningrad State Pedagogical Institute. A.I. Herzen.
Has published works in the field of art education. Since 1959 Renat Friedman is a participant in city, All-Union and foreign art exhibitions.
Friedman entered the art at the turn of the 1950s-1960s. The war was experienced at a conscious age. During the war years, as a teenager, he worked at a factory and for the rest of his life retained a sense of scale and rhythm of a huge organism - production, consisting of powerful technology and human will. For a man of his generation, the romance of great achievements was not at all an empty phrase or an abstract concept. Friedman creates graphic series dedicated to fishermen, oil workers, shipbuilders. Big open spaces, big tasks, strong people - he looked not from the side, understood, participated, attended, lived with one breath. By education a graphic artist, Friedman worked a lot in linocut technique. In it, he found plasticity, resilience and conciseness. He is experimenting with material, trying a lot of different tricks, looking for new opportunities, working with a stylus as freely as with a brush. Engraving will remain interesting for him all his life, although over time, painting will become more important.
The genre that has always been important to Friedman has always been portraiture. When comparing works of different years, there is a wonderful feeling that the artist begins each new canvas, as if forgetting everything that he knew how and did before. The image determines not only composition and color, but the flatness or bulkiness of the masses, the breadth of writing, the clarity or blur of the contour, the presence or absence of the situation, the plasticity of the figure and even the measure of realism - in a word, the whole figurative system, and there is no limit to this process of recognition and discovery. So, sometimes in the portraits of friends of artists Friedman approaches their own creative manner, in other works a certain grotesque proportions and contours appear, conveying the drama of the image and its internal dynamics with the external calmness of the production. In portraits of loved ones, the brush seems to caress the canvas, creating delicate overflows of color and softly modeled shapes.
Renat Arkadevich met his eightieth birthday with his wife in Spain. He loved this country and its artists very much, sought to meet with El Greco's legacy in Toledo, which he always particularly appreciated, looked at the canvases of old Spaniards in Prado, conceived future paintings - large, sonorous in color, powerfully and joyfully painted with a sweeping movement of a confident brush.
He died tragically in the fall of that year, being strong, energetic, full of creative possibilities and plans.
based on the materials of the site of the Exhibition Center St. Petersburg Union of Artists
