Sculpture artist, Tom Friedman’s ‘Looking Up‘ is the latest artwork to grace the Channel Gardens, facing Rockefeller Center. The ten-foot tall, stainless steel sculpture, depicts a quasi-human figure gazing up to the heavens ~ or maybe, like many New Yorkers know, there’s a lot to see when looking up!
The steel sculpture, set on a platform is one of several in a series, created from the use of crushed aluminum foil pans through a process of molding and lost wax casting. The artwork invites the public to stand at its base, look to the clouds and blue sky, and do the same.
The original sculpture from the series, Looking Up, was first shown in 2012 in London and stood just over thirty-three inches tall, followed by a 33.3 foot version.
Take a closer look at the larger version (33.3-foot tall) of Tom Friedman’s Looking Up from its installation on 53rd Street and Park Avenue for the Fund for Park Avenue in 2016 in a YouTube video (above) presented by Luhring Augustine.
In this series, the artist “brings to mind in particular the great modernist Alberto Giacometti’s walking men, which reached their culmination in his solitary figures of the early 1960s: elegant sculptures that subsumed the appearance of motion within static three-dimensional form and whose slender, haunting silhouettes became emblems of the post-World War II psyche.”
Tom Friedman’s ten-foot tall ‘Looking Up‘ is on view at the Channel Gardens, Fifth Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets, NYC through March, 2021. Also on view in The Channel Gardens, Future Green Studio continues its annual theme of an agricultural journey through historic New York. With a modernized, urban approach to the traditional concept of a woodshed, the central feature integrates the rustic materiality of stacked birch logs, all made from sustainably-sourced timber and recycled decking. The hut is both a refuge from the cold, and a beacon of light, surrounded by a thicket of native and adapted shrubs and perennials ~ with a neon allure of a sleepless city.
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Check out more images for Tom Friedman, “Looking Up” on the Stephen Friedman Gallery website.