Richard Artschwager at Gagosian Gallery Gagosian Gallery presents an exhibition of works by the late Richard Artschwager from a key period in his career, 1964 to 1987. From January 14 to March 11, 2021.
Source: Gagosian Gallery
Associated with many genres but conforming to none, Artschwager’s art has been variously described as Pop, because of its incorporation of quotidian objects and commercial materials; as Minimal, due to its crisp forms and solid geometric presence; and as Conceptual, owing to its cerebral engagement with information. This rare survey of the early decades of Artschwager’s varied career demonstrates his ability to rearrange the structures of perception, bringing the deceptive pictorial world of images into direct confrontation with the concretely human world of objects.
Through shifts in scale and transpositions of form and material, Artschwager’s artworks prompt anongoing reassessment of space and time, suggesting compound narratives and compositional complexities, often at once quotidian and surreal. Employing synthetic, commercial, and industrial materials, Artschwager transformed his sources with a deadpan visual wit that makes the familiar strange. In 1962 he began working with Formica, a radically unconventional and “low” material, then most closely associated with the slippery surface of lunch counters. Its high-shine, typically marbled finish is both recognizable from everyday life and bears an abstract resemblance to expressionist painting. The early 1960s also marked the beginning of Artschwager’s experiments with Celotex, a heavily textured compound board made from compressed sugarcane fiber, which he used as a ground for his singular grisaille paintings, the waywardness of the industrial material blurring and obscuring his hand-drawn lines. These compositions were often based on subjects both arcane and mundane; “Interior” (1964), for example, is a semiabstract, diagrammatic perspectival of a domestic setting, narrowing as depth perception progresses.
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