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Artist or Maker: Tom Friedman (b. 1965)

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Description: Tom Friedman (b. 1965) Untitled construction paper 5 x 34 x 9 in. (13 x 86.5 x 22.2 cm.) A reclining figure made out of a network of cut mesh construction paper Executed in 2001.

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Exhibited: London, Stephen Friedman Gallery,
Tom Friedman
, March-April 2002.
Milan, Fondazione Prada,
Tom Friedman
, October-December 2002, pp. 204-205 (illustrated).

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Notes: PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE EUROPEAN COLLECTION


It is only through Tom Friedman's exquisite genius or delusional perspicacity that his is able to take a mundane subject or trope and make it elegant, fascinating and something entirely new.
The present work, Untitled, 2001, is a reclining figure with no added information in posture, age or identity. It is transformed by Friedman's brilliance in making art out of everyday materials. Almost weightless in its constellatory construction of colored paper, the work gains further transcendence from the sheer lack of value of the material. Substance and importance in this work are the result of an additive and reductive genius. Reducing the material down to its basic quality and size and building something more complex then we imagine.
"Whether Friedman composes or decomposes the object on a microscopic or a macroscopic level, his work focuses on the comprehension of the fundamental mechanisms of the visual and plastic metabolism, and of its cellular division."(G. Celant, "The Anatomy of Things" Tom Friedman, ex. cat. Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2002).