Felipe Fredes, b. 1977, Santiago, Chile

Felipe Fredes is an interdisciplinary visual artist and professional neuroscientist born and raised in northern Chile. His work explores the nexus between art and science, frequently using laboratory instruments and imagery in his art practice and subject matter. His abstract oil paintings and photocollages explore memory, formation of self-image, time, and the lived experience. He received his B.A. in Biology from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in 2003, and his Ph.D. in Neurobiology and Cellular and Molecular Biology from the Universidad de Chile in 2009. His multidisciplinary perspective started developing when Fredes was doing scientific research in Saitama, Japan, and began exploring the region’s rich art in museums. Later, he received private art training from a prominent artist in Vienna, Austria. He has shown widely in solo and group exhibitions. Solo exhibitions include Brooklyn Art Cave, Brooklyn, New York; Gallery TESE, Aarhus, Denmark; Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark; and Galerie Zwischendecke, Vienna, Austria. Group exhibitions include Chilean Conexión, Berlin, Germany; and Van Gogh Gallery, Madrid, Spain. He has received research fellowships by the Fulbright Foundation, three fellowships from the National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research in Chile (CONICYT), awarded the Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST), and most recently, been appointed as an Assistant Professor at Aarhus University. He currently lives and works in Aarhus, Denmark.

Artist Statement:

My practice emerges from a background in neuroscience, where I was trained to study brain activity and its relation to perception and behavior. While this work provided powerful tools for analyzing neural processes, it also made clear the limitations of scientific frameworks in accounting for the qualitative and experiential dimensions of human life. This realization led me to develop an artistic practice that engages with these questions through material and aesthetic means.

Painting is my primary point of departure. I approach it as a process in which perception, gesture, and attention unfold over time—an embodied form of thinking that cannot be fully captured through measurement alone. In recent years, I have brought my scientific training into dialogue with this practice by recording EEG activity during painting, using it not as an explanatory tool, but as a way of generating new artistic material.

Through computational models such as Hidden Markov Model and generative systems, I translate neural activity into evolving visual forms. These works do not aim to represent inner experience, but to explore how it is transformed when mediated through data and algorithmic processes. The resulting images are multiple, unstable, and open to interpretation.

My work is situated within contemporary image culture shaped by AI, where tools such as Stable Diffusion produce images through complex and often opaque processes. I am particularly interested in how these technologies reshape questions of authorship, agency, and participation—especially when the source material is something as intimate as neural activity.

Rather than seeking to explain subjective experience, my work engages with its translation and transformation. It reflects an ongoing shift from analyzing the brain as an object of study to working with its traces as a material for artistic inquiry.