Opening reception with the artist: Thursday, September 11, 6–8 PM
Lehmann Maupin presents Detritus, an exhibition of new work by Tom Friedman, marking the artist’s first major show in New York in almost 10 years. Over the course of his nearly-four-decade career, Friedman’s oeuvre has explored materials and the object, photography and drawing, video exhibitions, and public sculptural installations, continuously pushing his work into new terrains. As critic Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times, “the artist Tom Friedman tends to blow our minds and then move on, rarely repeating himself.” In Detritus, Friedman makes his most drastic leap yet—into the world of traditional painting on canvas.
Painting is not entirely new to Friedman, who has investigated the medium in previous works and in non-traditional formats, such as painting on the floor, on sculptural elements, and through the use of tromp l’oeil. In his 2014 series Styrofoam and Paint, he presented a series of wall works that resembled monochromatic Color Field paintings. Now, in Detritus, Friedman presents, as he states, “not painting on something else, over something else, or painting on paper or wood, but painting on canvas,” allowing the works to enter an art historical lineage. His approach here is consistent with his practice overall—rooted in cycles of entropy, erosion, recycling, and review. The compositions on view in Detritus depict the exhibition’s namesake: garbage scraps from the ground, fragments of previous sculptures, or discarded packaging, all sourced from the artist’s own life.
To make these paintings, Friedman assembles and photographs still life arrangements, manipulates the images in Photoshop, and then renders them on canvas. He begins each composition with a palette of premixed and organized paint colors and a precise pencil drawing. He likens this to a musical score—the notes are there, the colors are prepared—but everything else is open to interpretation. This grants Friedman the ability to adapt varying painterly styles within each canvas, rendering certain aspects in great detail while others are left to dissolve into abstraction. Friedman, whose work is included in the permanent collections of major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, is well known for exploring the logic of scale in his work; previous art objects range from monumental, to miniscule, to entirely absent or conceptual. In Detritus, each composition is crafted to-scale, or life-sized, hung singularly on large walls with ample space around them. This gives the work a magnetic effect and draws viewers in, much like the vortexes seen across the exhibition, and the paintings become meditative objects.
The subject matter in the Detritus paintings falls roughly into three categories: singular objects, object groupings, and portraits. The paintings in the object groupings, including Yarn(Brain) (2025), are executed realistically while allowing for abstract moments to emerge from the detail—an attribute Friedman likens to the work of portraitist and painter John Singer Sargent. For example, an empty and crushed plastic water bottle becomes a conduit for light and translucency, softening the object’s edges, while a vibrant and tangled ball of yarn is at once a collection of hyper-individual threads and something else alltogether—a metaverse or neural network. Remarkably, these works register on both macro and micro scales, rendering quotidian objects at once recognizable and foreign.
Meanwhile, works like the eponymous Detritus (2025) depict fields of discarded materials in varied configurations, akin to 19th century German naturalist Ernst Haecke’s specimen prints, Manny Farber’s tabletop still life paintings, or Daniel Spoerri’s literal, wall-mounted tabletop works. In Friedman’s paintings, the viewer’s relationship to the object fields is always in flux, alternating between a focus on singular moments to a high-level, aerial view of the objects. Here, Friedman also includes references to his own oeuvre by depicting objects used in previous works, such as his oft used minced paper, a tennis ball with its fuzz removed, a tiny shoe made for another sculpture, or a photograph of a photogravure from his 2006 self-portrait Vanishing Point. In this way, Friedman brings his own studio practice into conversation with other quotidian materials, intertwining the two via the detritus of his own everyday life.
The new paintings also expand Friedman’s unique interpretation of self-portraiture, which the artist has explored for decades in works including Untitled (1994), where his likeness is carved into an aspirin tablet, and most recently Scribble Being (2023), a human-shaped collage of scribbles cut from published writings and images of Friedman’s artworks throughout the years. Friedman’s painting self-portrait (2025) is perhaps the most realistic yet; the work depicts a meticulously rendered image of the artist’s eyes, creased by an unseen smile, behind his glasses and against a plain white background. These disembodied eyes cast a shadow as they hover over the surface plane, positioning the artist as a magician who has disappeared the rest of his material self.
Finally, hanging high above the other works in the gallery is the lone sculptural work in the exhibition, comprising a small figure delicately balanced on a tightrope. Friedman first made a small wooden version of this work in 2014, but here, the welded metal tightrope walker crosses a vast expanse. In many ways, this figure represents Friedman himself, asserting the artist’s presence in the gallery and reminding those of us on the ground to look at everyday life from new heights, recontextualizing the material potentialities of the detritus around us and uncovering a sense of renewal amidst the mundane.
Media Inquiries
Julie Niemi, Associate Director of Public Relations
julie@lehmannmaupin.com
McKenna Quatro Johnson, Communications Manager
mckenna@lehmannmaupin.com