Tom Friedman - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, November 16, 2006 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Feature Inc., New York

  • Exhibited

    Stamford, Whitney Museum of American Art at Champion, Zero –G: When Gravity becomes Form, June 4-August 4, 1999
    Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, Waste Management, April 7-July 11, 1999 (another example exhibited)
    Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, July 8-October 1, 2000; San Francisco, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, November 4, 2000- January 28, 2001; Aspen Art Museum, February 16-April 15, 2001; Winston-Salem, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, July 14-September 24, 2001 and New York, The New Museum for Contemporary Art, October 12, 2001-February 3, 2002, Tom Friedman, p. 35 (another example exhibited; illustrated)

  • Literature

    B. Hainley, “Next to Nothing: The Art of Tom Friedman”, Artforum, November, 1995
    B. Adams and L. Liemann, Young Americans 2: New American Art at the Saatchi Gallery, London, 1998, n.p. (illustrated)
    Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, eds., Tom Friedman, Winston-Salem, 2000, p. 35 (illustrated)
    B. Hainley, D. Cooper and A. Searle, Tom Friedman, London, 2001, p. 49 (illustrated)
    G. Celant, ed., Tom Friedman, Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2002, pp. 14, (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    “The mixture of astonishment and immobile observation that accompanies Friedman’s works leads to bodily peace that allows a conscience enchanted with itself to re-emerge; this is almost a hidden truth that reveals itself, silent and speechless, as if it were very intense physical ecstasy. For this reason, in the interplay between the circularity of objects and the world, the artist begins to produce himself as an image, as part of everything, a fragment amid other fragments. This enables the universe of images and objects to coincide with the world, so that it even includes the first observer, the artist himself, who revels in his lightness and his special visibility and invisibility, his incorporeal essence that can transform him into a sign or an ethereal almost intangible entity. In 1990 he portrayed himself intent on blowing a spit bubble, in 1993 he photographed himself lying on the ceiling, and in 1994 when yawning: these three works are examples of a visual “miracle” that allows the gaze to penetrate the interstices or exalts the aerial nature of the body, highlighting its inner nature and the unknowable reverse of its gravitational encumbrance. The photographs are the reconstruction of a journey of discovery that originated from a new point of observation, that of an eye that places itself inside objects and bodies, and , at the same time, raises itself up on high, rejecting its weight in favor of lightness: it is, indeed, a world of unprecedented abundance.” (Germano Celant, “The Anatomy of Things,” Tom Friedman, Fondazione Prada, Milan, p. 14)

  • Artist Biography

    Tom Friedman

    American • 1965

    Tom Friedman is a multimedia artist working mainly in sculpture and works-on-paper. Interested in looking at the thin line between fantasy and autobiography, Friedman often creates works that push viewers into a complicit state of witnessing. His sculptures are composed of a multitude of objects, and he assembles them in such a way as to transform the mundane into an intricate work of art. He combines materials such as Styrofoam, foil, paper, clay, wire, hair and fuzz through a labor-intensive practice that seeks to tell a story, whether about himself or the world at large.

    Friedman's approach to autobiography is not memoiristic. Rather, he takes the smallest moments of his life, like a piece of paper found on the street, and blows it out of proportion.

    View More Works

66

Untitled

1993
Black and white photograph.
33 7/8 x 23 7/8 in. (86 x 60.6 cm).
Signed and numbered of seven on the reverse of the mount. This work is from an edition of seven. A photograph of the artist on the ceiling.

Estimate
$120,000 - 121,000 

Sold for $81,600

Contemporary Art Part I

16 Nov 2006, 7pm
New York