Art Basel was yet another great success for HUE.LIVE in its second collaboration with Lehmann Maupin, New York.  Hong Kong set the stage for Lehmann’s artist Tom Friedman where public spaces underwent technological activation, displaying augmented reality (AR) artworks at the art fair and around the city at designated locations.  

Friedman’s “Looking Up” (2015) sculpture extended beyond Hong Kong, appearing in seven locations including Seoul and New York.  Locations include Hong Kong Times Square, Harbour City, and Art Basel Hong Kong (Convention Center); South Korea’s Storage by Hyundai Card, Space K, and Lehmann Maupin Seoul; and outside the gallery’s Chelsea headquarters in New York City.

In the stainless steel cast version, the figure stares up to the sky encouraging visitors to stand at its feet and do the same.  The majority of Tom Friedman’s sculptures are cast from maquettes made of aluminum roasting pans, demonstrating his amazing ability to transform common materials.  

The AR version of Looking Up was produced in a few versions; as a replica at scale to the original created in 2015, another model that stood 10 meters high, and the highlight of the exhibition was a fully-animated, moving sculpture.

As Friedman explains, “Art, for me, is a context to slow the viewer’s experience from their everyday life in order to think about things they haven’t thought about, or to think in a new way.”

For this project with Lehmann Maupin’s platform CollectAR, it required four artists from HUE’s 3-D team to create this sculpture for AR, giving Art Basel viewers and collectors a way to visualize the artworks in real-time, without an app (browser only), at the art fair or in their personal spaces.

HUE was provided photographs of Tom Friedman’s original sculpture, then converted the artwork into a 3-D format.  This is the most common way artworks are transformed into augmented reality versions, some even sold as NFTs. 

In some cases, artworks can be recreated with techniques that use data from a few dozen to even hundreds of photographs of a single piece of art. Then, using software, HUE’s team can “build” a 3-D version of the object with data from the photographs to near perfection. 

If you’d like to experience HUE AR for your art business please contact us at [email protected] or click here. 

~ HUE TEAM 

About CollectAR

Looking Up is presented within Lehmann Maupin’s CollectAR Augmented Reality platform, which launched in March 2022. CollectAR was born as a partnership between the gallery and entrepreneur Laura Lehmann, who has worked with HUE.LIVE to develop models and 3-D renderings. For this initiative, our goal is to give the general public access to contemporary art, in a friendly and engaging way. By allowing users to experience artworks outside of a traditional gallery space, Looking Up opens up the conversation to younger audiences across the world.

Tom Friedman Biography 

Tom Friedman (b. 1965, Saint Louis, MO; lives and works in Leverett, MA) is a conceptual artist known for his meticulously fabricated work, including sculpture, painting, drawing, video, and installation. Friedman investigates the concepts of perception, logic, and plausibility with a strong attention to detail. Since the early 1990s, Friedman has utilized an array of sophisticated processes to achieve a seemingly mass-produced appearance. His highly conceptual work engages both maximalist and minimalist aesthetics, as well as recalling those of Pop Art, and his practice is deeply engaged with the history of sculpture.

Friedman draws from personal experiences to recreate prosaic moments from everyday life. His work tends toward the darkly humorous, and his often sarcastic use of materials has distinguished his practice over the last 30 years.  Made from a wide variety of unconventional materials, such as Styrofoam, foil, plastic, wire, paper, clay, and hair, Friedman’s work often surprises the viewer. As Friedman explains, “Art, for me, is a context to slow the viewer’s experience from their everyday life in order to think about things they haven’t thought about, or to think in a new way.”

Throughout his career, Friedman has developed an important body of outdoor and public sculptures. Most of these are cast from maquettes rendered out of aluminum roasting pans, further cementing the artist’s alchemic ability to transform the everyday. In his celebrated large-scale sculpture Looking Up (2015), a figure looks to the sky, inviting viewers to stand at its base and do the same. Looking Up was installed at the entrance of Rockefeller Center’s Channel Gardens in January 2021, and has previously been exhibited at Park Avenue, New York; South Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois; and the Contemporary Austin, Texas, among others.

Tom Friedman received a BFA in graphic illustration from Washington University in St. Louis in 1988 and an MFA in sculpture from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1990. Solo exhibitions of his work have been organized at Gagosian Gallery (2006 and 2008); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL (2000); Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO (1997); and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (1995). Friedman’s work has also been included in major group exhibitions including Shapes of Space, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2007); Recent Acquisitions: Contemporary Sculpture, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2004); SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM (2004); Self-Portraits from the Permanent Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2000); New Work: Drawing Today, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (1997); and the São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo, Brazil (1996). Friedman has received numerous awards, including an Academy Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1993), the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1993), and a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2001). He was also a finalist for the Hugo Boss Prize in 2000. Friedman lives and works in Leverett, Massachusetts.