Tom Friedman - Contemporary Art London Friday, October 13, 2006 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Feature Inc., New York; Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica

  • Exhibited

    Santa Monica, Christopher Grimes Gallery, The Visionary Landscape, January 8-February 19, 2000; 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. 72 (another example exhibited; illustrated); New York, Luhring Augustine Gallery, Portraits of Artists: A Selection of Photographic Works from the Collection of Rex Capital, Rhode Island, January 7- February 11, 2006 (another example exhibited); New London, Lyman Allyn Art Museum, The Cartin Collection, Subject: Contemporary Portraiture, May 14-August 14, 2006 (another example exhibited)

  • Literature

    Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, eds., Tom Friedman, Winston-Salem, 2000, p. 72 (illustrated); G. Celant, ed., Tom Friedman, Milan, 2002, n.p. (illustrated); B. Hainley, D. Cooper and A. Searle, Tom Friedman, London, 2001, p. 68 (illustrated); Guggenheim Museum, eds., Hugo Boss Prize, New York, 2000, p. 57 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    In the present lot, Friedman has taken a profile of his entire body, scanning the image digitally. The artist then extended each color pixel from the picture horizontally thirty-eight inches, leaving only layer upon layer of color. The result is an intensely fine working of blue, gray, and flesh tones—a landscape of digital reproduction in Minimalist mode.

    Perhaps most interesting about the current lot, in appreciation of the rest of Friedman’s career, is his forced alteration of the original state of the portrait. Unlike other works of his, in which the artist allowed natural forces such as gravity and the material’s physical properties to define the work’s ultimate form, Friedman here plays with the complex contents of the photograph-- dissecting each pixel and extending it into one, long horizontal strip, presenting himself in a highly exaggerated shape, unrecognizable obliquely as a portrait. Friedman investigates the molecular makeup of the portrait—eventually breaking it down to siphon the individual ingredients, restoring it only partially using its own building blocks. The artist succeeds in testing what we see versus what we perceive.

  • 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

58

Untitled

1998
Lambda print.
24 1/2 x 46 in. (62.2 x 116.8 cm).
Signed “Friedman” and numbered of two on the reverse. This work is an artist’s proof from an edition of four plus two artist’s proofs.


Estimate
£40,000 - 60,000 

Sold for £48,000

Contemporary Art

14 Oct 2006, 7pm
London