Vistamare is pleased to present Open Unto, Tom Friedman’s second solo exhibition at the gallery in Milan.
The artist presents a series of new works created specifically for this exhibition, focusing on the world of our everyday existence, a world of objects and of images. Twenty years on from his exhibition at the Fondazione Prada, Tom Friedman is addressing experience and perception: the works on show are composed of unconventional materials that challenge our visual expectations. Objects creating an interplay between solids and voids become a means of probing and exploring the question of space. Material is transformed into sculpture and sculpture into material, in a continual stream of cross-references between ordinary, everyday iconographies, which never slide fully into abstraction but utilize the forms that are present to explore possibilities of scale and light. On a graph representing space-time, Friedman’s works represent velocity—the continuous flow of life, in the course of which we change, and hopefully evolve.
Tom Friedman was born in Saint Louis (1965), Missouri. He lives and works in Massachusetts. The starting point for his research is a uniquely idiosyncratic approach combined with the use of everyday materials and objects, such as styrofoam, pencils, paper, spaghetti and plastic cups, exploring the relationship between the making of art and the psychology of our perception of art. Like a scientist studying empirical and non-empirical phenomena and an object’s infinite references, Friedman analyses its imperceptible transformations. His work has been exhibited all over the world: The Museum of Modern Art, Moma, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; Fondazione Prada, Milan; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; South London Gallery; Mead Art Museum and numerous other institutions.