Tom Friedman: Cocktail Party

Jeffrey Deitch presents Tom Friedman’s Cocktail Party (2015) one of the artist’s major works, at the 7000 Santa Monica Boulevard gallery, opening during Frieze LA week. The artist describes Cocktail Party as a “3-D cartoon, consisting of 20 figures interacting.” The group of figures blends with the group of viewers.

The exhibition will also include two recent figurative sculptures, Big Hug (2022), representing two figures in an all-consuming embrace, and Kid (2023), an 8 foot tall figure in an ecstatic gesture, textured with a multitude of objects. Pong (2017) a video projection of a vintage Pong video game will be presented in the mezzanine gallery in natural light, giving it a ghostly appearance.

Friedman’s work is the result of epiphanies discovered through what he calls “the meditative artist’s gaze.” The more closely Friedman investigates an object, such as a pencil, the less clear it becomes, until the object dissolves into itself. He moves from the perfect marriage of form and content to deadpan humor, to the nihilistic questions of why even “bother” to make art, to the joy of being.

Each artwork for Friedman is an invention with new processes to learn and new problems to solve. Although his work looks different from piece to piece there is a web of continuity to be discovered. Friedman has said he builds his work from the atom up, which could mean every detail is to be considered.

Cocktail Party, Pong, Big Hug and Kid represent a maturing of Friedman’s process. This figurative sculptural work continues his investigation into the existential meaning of the object to the existential meaning of being human, the self, relationships, wonder, and the complexity of one’s experience. Present in these works are the everyday materials and humor. As Friedman says, “the humility and humor in my work allows a space to think about the seriousness of being in and of the world.”