Richard Artschwager

Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers are pleased to present sculptures by the American artist Richard Artschwager from the years 1961 to 2006.

Since the early 1960s, Richard Artschwager, born in Washington D.C. in 1923, creates sculptures evoking associations with common place objects such as furniture and household appliances. Firstly these works were shown at Leo Castelli, New York in 1965 and have attained greatest international reputation since then. For the first time in art history, Richard Artschwager uses do-it-yourself materials like Formica and Cerotex becoming exemplary for future artist generations.

The exhibition is surely dominated by crates - objects that resemble shipping crates, made of untreated pinewood, carefully fabricated, reinforced and screwed. Irritating the viewer with their specific form, they seem to refer to a content inside the crate, however the packaging is the content. Thus Artschwager plays with the spacial atmosphere of the gallery presenting the crates like art objects.

A further material – rubberized horse hair – appears in the work of Artschwager since 1967. This unusual material challenges the viewer „haptically“ as well as „visually“, as seen in his work „Hair Crate (Frosted)“. Here, Artschwager contrasts the clear geometrical structures of a crate with soft and lively silhouettes.

The piece "Splatter Chair, Table, Mirror" takes up two walls reaching over the corner. With its bizarre, fractured form, this piece is an example of an ordinary object reorganized and rendered in an almost cubistic way. As with other „splatter pieces“, Artschwager combines different surfaces with paint and Formica veneer over wood.

Artschwager´s oeuvre cannot be ascribed to any of the categories of the established discourse on art, not even to art in the traditional sense. He is no more a creator of pictures than he is a producer of appliances. His objects can be seen as pre-pictures, sculpted incidents that are intended to help us see through standard ways of looking at things as illustrations or replicas of pre-conceived expectations.

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Richard Artschwager