Friederike Oeser (b. 1959 Nuremberg) is an international artist with exhibits and works in private and public collections in Asia, Europe and the United States.
Friederike Oeser is known for her abstract works including cutouts, drawings, silkscreens and sculptures, designed to make the conscious and subconscious meet and to make the ordinary appear miraculous.
She turns flat planes into paintings, imagined proportions into actual surfaces, moods into colors, and tones into lines and contrasts, allowing viewers to see the world in a new way. —Björn Vedder, Ph.D.
Friederike Oeser lives and works in Munich, Germany, where she studied art and graphic design. From 1980 to 1989 she worked as a graphic artist and art director in Munich and London. Later, inspired by trips to Asia and Africa, she began her art career in 1989 creating oil pastels and pencil drawings. Over time, her oil pastel paintings have become more abstract, providing her with a greater sense of freedom to explore and experiment. With her transition to abstraction in 2000, she began working on three dimensional cut-outs made of cardboard, forex and plexiglass; aluminum sculptures and silkscreen printing on canvas.
New York: Frequent visits to New York in the past eleven years have been important for new inspirations, resulting in aluminum sculptures, oil pastels, cut-outs, and silkscreens on canvas. With names like “Madison Avenue,” “Times Square,” “99 Gansevoort Street”, “The Piers“ or “Met Museum“ she is rapidly gaining a following among American collectors and gallerists alike.
Most recently, Friederike has shown at the Montserrat Gallery and Van De Plas in New York City, and in 2025 at Susan Eley Fine Art in Hudson, NY.
Artist Statement
My artworks are a reflection of the way I see things. I am expanding the reality to new compositions. I always start with traveling to new places.
The inconspicuous is the most essential element of my work. I can get excited about a trickle of water running over the cobblestones on the ground, creating a pattern of irregular lines, inspiring creativity for my abstract work.
My perception seems to go through my whole body and becomes abstract during this process. I don’t know at the beginning where the work will take me or what it will look like at the end.
It becomes something totally different than I have seen in reality. For me, abstraction means freedom, and it allows the viewer to look at the work with an open mind and see the world in a new fresh way.
About my Silkscreen Paintings
I first started in 2008 doing silkscreens in Chiang Mai, Thailand — not to create editions in the traditional sense, but to get a clear, smooth transparent color application and to superimpose layers and shapes. Since this stencil technique is best for what I want to express, I can use my photo-narratives and I enjoy applying one color over another with a squeegee.
A painting on canvas or paper can take from 50 to 200 steps, starting from draft to the final version. The challenge is to present colors and shapes in a harmonious relationship and to stop at the right moment. Every color must be correct the first time. There are hardly no possibilities for corrections. In spite of these limitations, I prefer to work spontaneously to maintain my freedom of creativity.
About my Cut-Outs
I have created cut-outs since 2011.
My works are always without background, this is because I only focus on parts of my perception. So it seemed obvious to me to cut out the shapes and reassemble them into three-dimensional objects. I use materials like cardboard, plastic, plexiglass, and aluminum panels.