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Artist or Maker: TOM FRIEDMAN

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Provenance:   Luhring Augustine, New York

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Exhibited:   NewYork, Luhring Augustine, The Art of Chess, October 28 – December 23, 2005

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Literature:   B. Eskin, “The Plaster-Filled Eggshell Gambit,” The New York Times, October 16, 2005

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Notes:
Tom Friedman’s intensely thought-out yet playful chess set functions as a mini-retrospective of the artist’s best known works including a miniature portrait of the artist carved out of Styrofoam and a plastic cup full of gravel made out of Play-Doh.The board is a wooden table and is accompanied by two severed tree trunks as seats, with a six-pack of Busch beer nearby, presumably for use by players.The present lot was created for The Art of Chess, a group exhibition that included artists such as Damien Hirst,Yayoi Kusama, and Jake and Dinos Chapman. Friedman’s work stood apart, as is typical of the artist’s oeuvre, by following only his own rules.
Tom Friedman said he meant to make something “semi-dysfunctional.” His self-referential set-a sharpened pencil, a toothpaste box, a toppled plastic Staunton king as a pawn – is a tabletop retrospective of his own philosophically playful oeuvre, and no two pieces are alike. “Most of the chessboards that I’ve seen have been thematic – good versus evil, an aesthetic consistency,” Mr. Friedman said. “I wanted to completely break that apart." Mr. Friedman weaned himself from a four-year-long obsession with online chess.
B. Eskin, “The Plaster-Filled Eggshell Gambit,” The NewYork Times, October
16, 2005