Paul Freeman

BiographyPaul Freeman is an Edmonton-based multidisciplinary artist whose creative energies involve drawing and painting, photography and photo collage, short animated films and sculpture. Thematically, his practice is engaged with themes like excess, transformation, strange genetic mutations, sex, reproduction and the beauty of death. In some of his better-known works, the artist is inspired by what he describes as “the relationships and tensions between humans and animals”. Rather than focus on the natural world’s beauty and sublime character or its vulnerability in the face of human civilization, a Freeman work will likely run in the opposite direction: towards to the more unsettling aspects of Nature such as sexual display. There is an aspect of the bizarre and the unimaginable, the stunning and the surreal, in nearly all of his art.

Paul Freeman is a graduate of the Alberta College of Art + Design (ACAD) (1998) and the University of Alberta where he received his MFA (2005) in Drawing and Intermedia. Since 1995, the artist has received numerous scholarships, grants and awards from public and private funders like Canada Council, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, ACAD, University of Alberta, Enbridge and the Edmonton Arts Council. Since 1995, he has also participated in many group and solo exhibitions. It’s Only Natural featuring two provocative life-size sculptures of antlered and aroused elk at Art Gallery of Alberta received the Eldon and Anne Foote Visual Arts Prize in 2013. He also appeared in the 2007 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art. A community activist, Freeman is the founder and Artistic Director at the Nina Haggerty Centre for the Arts which is an arts centre for artists with developmental disabilities.