John Chamberlain
Gondola Walt Whitman, 1981–82
Painted and chrome-plated steel
24 × 162 × 20 inches (61 × 411.5 × 50.8 cm)
© 2016 Fairweather & Fairweather LTD/
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Photo by Douglas M. Parker Studio
John Chamberlain – Poetic Form – Gagosian Gallery Gagosian Gallery Geneva presents an exhibition of sculptures and works on paper by John Chamberlain. September 7 – November 3, 2016.]]>
Source: Gagosian Gallery Geneva
During his lifetime, Chamberlain was perhaps best known for his distinctive metal sculptures, constructed from discarded automobile-body parts and other modern industrial detritus, which he began making in the late 1950s. While freely experimenting with other materials—from galvanized steel and paper bags to Plexiglas, foam rubber, and aluminum foil—he consistently returned to metal car components, which he humorously called “art supplies.” Chamberlain’s works boldly contrast the everyday, industrial origin of materials with a cumulative formal beauty, often underscored by the given paint finish of the constituents. The process of construction has its roots in industrial fabrication, given that mechanical car-crushers often imparted preliminary form to his raw materials. Chamberlain’s emphasis on discovered or spontaneous correlations between materials rather than a prescribed idea of composition have often prompted descriptions of his work as three-dimensional Abstract Expressionist paintings. Crumpling, crushing, bending, twisting, painting, and welding the metals to form individual objects, he combined them into imposing aggregations.
With works dating from 1975 to 1988, the exhibition focuses on Chamberlain’s mid-career return to the use of car metal as a sculptural material, as well as his long-term interest in vibrant, colorful expression in two and three dimensions. Chamberlain broke from his pattern of using discarded autoparts in 1965, only to return to it in 1972. At times, his riotous structures would adhere to certain geometries: the wall relief, Chamouda (1975), is from a series of painted and chrome-plated steel sculptures that were each tilted to the left at an angle of 45 degrees. Bright pops of colored metal are variously intertwined with glinting steel, and the visual effects shift with the viewer’s movement. Chamberlain also gave structure to otherwise unconstrained abstraction in a series of drawings from 1976, “View from the Cockpit”. Each drawing comprises three cut pieces of paper, collaged vertically and with conflicting patterns of delicate, sprayed pigment. The thin center band that bisects the upper and lower halves of every sheet suggests the sequential frames of a film strip, while alluding to the horizon of an indiscernible landscape.
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