Tom Friedman - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Friday, October 12, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Feature Inc., New York; Van de Weghe Fine Art, New York

  • Exhibited

    Milan, Fondazione Prada, Tom Friedman, October 24 - December 15, 2002

  • Literature

    G. Celant, ed., Tom Friedman, Milan, 2002, p. 312 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    The fly sculptures initially began with an incident where the artist Charles Long, who used my shit piece in a show he was curating called ‘Critical Mass’, had to put a cup over the piece of shit because a fly was buzzing around it. He sent me a photograph of the cup over the shit and the fly on the pedestal. That sparked the fly pieces.
    Tom Friedman in conversation with Dennis Cooper, taken from Tom Friedman, London, 2003, p. 31

    Tom Friedman is a formalist. Tom Friedman practices Dada. Tom Friedman is the arbiter of an inverted Surrealism, where the object's unconscious, and not the artist's, is on view. Tom Friedman is a Minimalist. Most of all, Tom Friedman is a conceptual artist. But what manner of conceptual artist is he? Friedman does not use ideas as machines (Sol LeWitt), nor does he traffic in metaphysical questions of the nature of art, representation, and semiotics (Joseph Kosuth). He is hardly a dematerializer of art (Lucy Lippard and John Chandler). In fact, if anything, he is a rematerializer of art. For him, conceptual art is a verb, not a noun. It is a doing and a thinking.
    T. N. Goodeve, Tom Friedman, Los Angeles, 2006, p. 7


  • 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

208

Untitled

2002
Two flies comprised of plastic, hair, fuzz, Play-dough, wire, paint and wooden pedestal.
20 1/2 x 20 1/2 x 20 in. (52.1 x 52.1 x 50.8 cm) overall. Two handmade flies rest on a cube.

Estimate
£60,000 - 70,000 

Sold for £36,000

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

Evening Sale
13 October 2007, 4pm
London