Perhaps it is no surprise that the artist Tom Friedman has depicted flies and bees over and over — their wandering movements mirror his own as he alights on different projects, mediums and ideas.
Just as those insects’ flight plans are based on logic and stimuli that are difficult to comprehend, Friedman’s zigzag trajectory is highly intentional, even if it is legible only to him.
“This is someone who lives in his own head,” said Madeleine Grynsztejn, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and a longtime supporter of his work.
In a studio visit here on a hot summer day, at the multiroom, former lawyer’s office in the center of town where he works, Friedman referred more than once to the “circular logic” that appeals to him, as well as to the concept of the “cross-pollination” of ideas.
Another recurring motif for him is looping, tangled-up lines that are not unlike a bee’s flight path; he once made such a work from glued-together pieces of cooked spaghetti.
“Wonder and curiosity have been underlying themes in my work,” said Friedman, 60.
That will be evident to those who attend next week’s Frieze Seoul art fair, where the Lehmann Maupin booth will feature three of his works. In its New York space, the gallery also has a Friedman show, “Detritus,” which begins the same day the fair does, Sept. 4.
Friedman may be best known for the sort of witty, Conceptual sculptures and installations that got him a Museum of Modern Art exhibition in 1995, when he was just turning 30.
In his studio, there were a few pieces in this vein, including “Hole in the Wall” (2022), featuring a small hole drilled in the wall and the resulting shavings that fell to the floor.
Another work on display was “My Old Shoe” (2025), a piece that will be in the New York gallery show, made up of his own New Balance sneaker, torn apart and dissected into small component parts and arranged to resemble a mask.
“It comes from the Buddhist saying that you wear out your ego like an old shoe,” Friedman said.
The Frieze Seoul presentation will include “Poppyseed” (2022), a black sculpture in Styrofoam resembling a piece of coral.
A viewer would not necessarily think that these works were all made by the same artist.
As Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times in 2014, “The artist Tom Friedman tends to blow our minds and then move on, rarely repeating himself.”
His playful and irreverent approach is catnip for collectors like the filmmaker John Waters, who lives with two Friedman works, one in Baltimore and one in San Francisco.
“I’m a big fan,” said Waters, who was delighted by a Friedman New York gallery show in 1993, which he recalled attending with the star of his 1990 movie “Cry-Baby,” Johnny Depp. “Tom has a great sense of humor, but he’s also a serious artist.”
Waters especially loved “Untitled (A Curse)” (1992) in that New York gallery show. The work looks like an empty plinth, but it was supposedly cursed by a witch who hexed the space around it — a conceit very much up Waters’s alley, given the way it could be read as poking fun at the art world and the way meaning is assigned arbitrarily.
“There’s something innocent about what he does that makes people crazy,” Waters said.
Friedman loves to experiment. In his studio, one of the rooms is dedicated to welding, a skill he learned and does with the help of an assistant, resulting in pieces like “Untitled (tightrope walker)” (2024), a welded work in the upcoming New York show, “Detritus,” which features a tiny, somewhat abstracted figure balancing on a wire.
He has made large-scale public sculptures like “Looking Up” (2020), which was shown at Rockefeller Center in 2021, in stainless steel with a texture meant to look like crumpled up aluminum foil. The 10-foot-tall silver figure stands on a pedestal, gazing toward the sky, mirroring the pose the viewer must take to see it.
But his most radical and recent move is to attempt for the first time the most familiar art form and subject.
“This is really still-life painting,” he said of several works in “Detritus,” including the 2025 painting that gives the show its name, which depicts a densely packed field of tennis balls, dollar bills, bits of plastic, gloves, a French fry container and the like.
Although he has used paint before, mostly it has not been in this traditional vein.
In “Bee” (2025), also in the New York show, the buzzing protagonist is a tiny figure in a mostly empty top section of the canvas (though the bee’s loop-the-loops are faintly rendered), with a smaller horizon of discarded items at the bottom. Friedman often likes to leverage large areas of negative space to focus attention and create contrast.
In Seoul, he will show another more traditional painted work, “Still Life” (2025), which features in its tightly packed composition a plastic squirt gun, SpongeBob SquarePants and a paper bag with holes torn out, making it look like the classic Greek tragedy mask.
For many contemporary artists, depicting trash would be an environmental commentary or a way to work through anxiety about waste, but in this, as in other things, Friedman is an outlier.
“I’m very optimistic,” he said. “I think we’re heading toward a renaissance.” Though he acknowledged, “The time before a renaissance is never exactly hunky-dory.”
Finding beauty in garbage may also reflect his interest in the lessons of Buddhism and other philosophies he has steeped himself in.
“I’m really a philosopher, but my curse is I can only tell it through art,” he said.
His wife, Mary Ryan, recalled in an email how Friedman once dealt with a disastrous flood from a burst pipe in a previous studio he had in the area.
“We stood as we watched every computer, camera and drawing left on the desks be decimated with hundreds of gallons of water,” Ryan said.
Her husband “didn’t even flinch,” she added. “He’s so bloody enlightened. He accepted it as part of the process and relished in it.”
During Friedman’s childhood in St. Louis, he took art classes on weekends when he was elementary-school age, and like a lot of successful artists, he held onto a youthful sense of play. “I never put the crayons down,” he said.
After graduating from Washington University in St. Louis, he did an M.F.A. from 1988 to 1990 at the University of Illinois Chicago. He then spent three more years in Chicago, at one point working at the Field Museum, the local natural history museum, doing exhibition preparation.
He was distracted enough by his nascent art-making career and gallery shows in Chicago and New York that he got “demoted to changing lightbulbs” at the museum, he said.
His Chicago ties were meaningful for his career.
In 1996, Grynsztejn, then a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, organized a two-person show there, “Affinities: Chuck Close and Tom Friedman.” The MCA Chicago organized his first survey exhibition in 2000.
“He belongs to an important parallel universe of artists who have cut their own swath — these artists with singular visions they pursue in the face of any headwind,” Grynsztejn said, citing Cindy Sherman as an example.
She added, “Eventually we catch up to them. Not the other way around.”
Friedman moved to the East Coast to do a two-year stint as a visiting artist at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and then moved to western Massachusetts, where he has stayed for the last 30 years (he lives about 20 minutes from his studio, in the town of Leverett).
As someone who has made a living from his art for most of his career, Friedman has done something that relatively few artists achieve. Despite the sales and the good reviews, a certain unknowable aspect in Friedman’s work may be a permanent element, more of a feature than a bug (even when it depicts an actual bug).
When asked if he felt understood and appreciated by the art world generally, Friedman did not hesitate to answer, seemingly without rancor.
“No, not at all,” he said.
The post Playful and Provocative, the Artist Tom Friedman Lands in Seoul and New York appeared first on New York Times.
