Tom Friedman, artist and art
Born 1965, Birth St. Louis, Missouri, USA.
The artist lives and works in Conway, Massachusetts.
Style and technique, exhibitions: Sculpture Objects, Neo-Conceptualism, Postminimalism, Ready Made Art,Artist biography, artworks, statement, interview, review, exhibition:
Auctions & Auction Results
From leading auction houses worldwide, Tom Friedman on Mutualart
tom friedman’s funny and clever sculptures are passive-aggressive,
we see them through the eyes of the outsider, the alien, the artist.
looking at these sculptures is sort of like looking too closely
in the mirror and seeing fields of blackheads on your otherwise
lovely and photogenic nose. but at the same time things are
simpler here on friedman’s side…
One of the first things viewers tend to notice about Friedman’s art is that much of it is relatively small in scale. In fact, a disproportionate amount of his work seems to verge on the invisible. A piece of paper that has been stared at for 1,000 hours, or a sculpture pedestal over which a curse literally hangs, propose that the viewer contemplate an artwork that, for all intents and purposes, does not exist in way that can be confirmed by the senses. Similarly, a daddy-long-legs clinging to the side of another pedestal appears at first to be an incursion from the quotidian world to the world of art. To Friedman, the adjectives that viewers often attach to his art – fleeting, ephemeral, fragile and self-effacing – describe an experience that seems open and questioning, rather than rigid or absolutist. In this sense, Friedman represents a philosophical approach to making sculpture that can best be described as ‘anti-monumental.’..
Tom Friedman’s work seduces the audience into a deeper phenomenological discourse about art and life. Quantum Physicist David Bohm tells us that the shape of a bumble bee’s wings, their velocity of operation and their size, compared to the bee’s body conflict with its ability to fly – plainly, this thing should not be flying! Tom Friedman’s work is this way – is it really art?
The quirky, beautiful work of Tom Friedman defies categorization. While his art is often linked to 1960s Conceptualism and Minimal art, Friedman invents his own visual language through his almost obsessive attentiveness to detail and his striking ability to transform the familiar into the unexpected…
Exhibitionviews
