Dieter Froese

Dieter Froese (born Hans-Dietrich Froese) (1937–2006) was a pioneering video installation artist who also worked in film, sculpture, and photography.

Early life Froese was born on October 9, 1937, outside the town of Tilsit, in the former state of East Prussia, (now Sovetsk in western Russia). His father was a cheesemaker. During the final months of World War II, he and his mother fled to the forest from war-torn Berlin as it fell to the Red Army and they eventually took shelter with family near Nuremberg. The large scale installation deploys real and dummy surveillance cameras and monitors that track viewers' movement through various rooms in the museum. Inspired by George Orwell's notion of dystopia, the work sheds light on how personal freedoms are compromised by the panoptical presence of surveillance and its associated cultural control. In the exhibition catalog for the Surveillance show at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, video curator, John Hanhardt wrote that Froese's "projects are fashioned out of the expectations and frustrations that challenge and inhibit our daily lives."

Froese exhibited his multi-media art works at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, White Columns, Hallwalls, LACE, Kunstmuseum Bonn, and many other international venues.

Froese's work has been written about in the following books, Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age; The Literariness of Media Art; and Pop Goes the Decade: The Eighties.

He was also a video producer, having founded Dekart Video in Manhattan, with his wife Kay Hines. They created videos for leading museums such as the Smithsonian, as well as music videos for the rock 'n' roll band R.E.M. among others. LUX, London; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía; Neue Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, among others.

Death Froese died in New York from cancer in 2006.