Artists & Works

In many ways Richard Artschwager is an anomaly among contemporary artists working today. Neither the path of his career nor the aesthetic of his work fall neatly into expected patterns. Initially embarking on a career in science, Artschwager only gradually began to turn his complete attention to art-making during his young adulthood, and for a number of years made a living at odd jobs and, most importantly, furniture making, which later deeply informed his artwork. His painting and sculpture remained a private and background pursuit—the furniture he was making at the time eventually provided the entry point into fine art.

Artschwager's sculpture often employs "fake" materials, such as Formica patterned to look like a wood surface. The artist sees such materials as images in and of themselves, or in a sense as photographs, which he appropriates for his artwork. Additionally, in his typically rational yet radical manner, Artschwager believed fundamentally in the use of the forms of everyday objects as the basis for his sculpture. While he shared some of these tenets with his Pop contemporaries, such as Claes Oldenburg, Artschwager's cerebral approach and lack of interest in emulating the bright colors and advertising of capitalist culture in his art set him outside the borders of Pop, aligning him more closely with, if anyone, early 20th century Dada innovator Marcel Duchamp.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Waldemar Januszczak, Sunday Times (London), 12/23/01
" We are certainly watching a craftsman's appreciation of the simple beauty of lowly materials. In Artschwager's shows I always feel the presence of an unseen carpenter enjoying the exhibits with me, running his hand along the immaculate joins and whispering: lovely bit of work there. Since it's Christmas, since slippages of reality are more in order than at other times of the year, let me also admit that I also sense the desire for an inchoate religious plangency. Doesn't that beautiful pared- down table have something of the altar about it? Joseph was also a carpenter. Christ was born in a manger. Cribs are a carpenter's achievement, too. These are coincidences, but they feel pertinent. These days, we are used to seeing bits and pieces of domestic interior snipped out of their normal context and repositioned in the art gallery as a new kind of sculpture. Think, for instance, of Rachel Whiteread's plaster casts of the spaces beneath a chair, or Scott Burton's false benches that sit in art galleries and taunt the real benches around them with their uselessness. Artschwager started all this tinkering with the reality of fixtures and fittings. He started various revolutions in art. "

Roberta Smith, New York Times, 1/25/88
" A master of the reconstructed readymade, an assiduous manipulator of appropriated images, forms and uningratiating, non-art materials (often within the same hybridized painting-sculpture), Mr. Artschwager established himself as a free agent, a jack-of-all-trades. Since the 1970's, he has been claimed as founding father or kindred spirit by successive waves of younger artists, from New Image to the recent Neos of Geo and Conceptual. He's been inducted into numerous group exhibitions and probably into the appropriation hall of fame: the staples of his art - abstracted furniture forms, wood-grain Formica and paintings on a canvas-weave vinyl called Celotex - have been widely influential and perpetually cloned. Despite all this, Mr. Artschwager's reputation maintains its grass-roots status: one of the things that make this show such a pleasure is that the work is relatively free of hype. ...Despite its current modishness and eternal thorniness, Mr. Artschwager's art takes as one of its big themes the anonymous and inexorable passing of the American scene, of its people, objects and buildings. Its prescient use of the ''generic'' or the ''simulacrum'' may ultimately be less interesting than its affinity to an artist like Edward Hopper. Beneath Mr. Artschwager's irony is an elegiac strain, a desire to hold time and show us what has been lost. "