Jake Fried (b. 1984, USA) is an American artist and animator who transforms painting into hypnotic motion. Using ink, gouache, white-out, and collage, he hand-draws every frame of his stop-motion animations. What began as a painting practice gradually evolved into animation, as he became fascinated with watching images continuously transform over time. His one-minute films, often composed of hundreds or thousands of sequential handmade frames, have been shown internationally at venues like Tate Modern and the Sundance Film Festival, and commissioned by clients including Adult Swim and Netflix. Fried calls his work “moving paintings” dynamic canvases that blur the line between painting and film, inviting viewers into constantly shifting, dream-like visuals.

We became instant fans the moment we saw his work online and had the chance to experience his presentation at SILK: Between Worlds at Lume Studios, NYC (2025), where we had a chat afterward. Learning more about his process made us even more excited: each frame is hand-drawn and the physical artwork is destroyed so it exists only digitally as part of the animation. His creativity, combined with his relentless drive to experiment with animation, is on another level. We’ve collected four 1/1 stills from his Night Vision animation (see above), and in December 2025 we acquired two 5 second animations from his Genesis Mint, MAXIMUM EFFORT.

> Basement awaiting curation