Tom Friedman - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Saturday, June 28, 2008 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Feature Inc., New York

  • Exhibited

    Milan, Fondazione Prada, Tom Friedman, 25 October – 15 December, 2002; New York, Hudson Valley Centre for Contemporary Art, Symbolic Space, June 2004 – April 2005

  • Literature

    G. Celant, ed., Tom Friedman, Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2002, p. 27 and 314 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    Friedman continues to meditate on all manner of material existence from dust bunnies to the cosmos, from the idea of nothing to the idea of everything. Quirky, humorous and endearing, his mutations and transformations of base material is something that we were first aquatinted with at the beginning of the 20th century. Although slightly altered in concept, the idea is as such similar to that of Marcel Duchamp and his famous readymade ‘Fountain' from 1917.
    The idea of using a pre-existing object and transforming it into a work of art is the essence of the ‘Duchampian' idea. In the present lot, Friedman has utilised a number of Styrofoam cups and painted each of them individually, placing one ontop of the other to create a multi-coloured tower that is visually captivating both through shape and form as well execution and detail.

  • 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

231

Untitled

2002

Acrylic paint on Styrofoam cups.

426.7 x 7.6 x 7.6 cm. (166 1/2 x 3 x 3 in).

Estimate
£150,000 - 250,000 

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

29 June 2008, 5pm
London