Richard Artschwager

The art that I make takes place about one step away from the normal stir of human activity.
—Richard Artschwager

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new sculptures by Richard Artschwager. This is his first exhibition in Rome.

For five decades, Artschwager has forged a maverick path by confounding the generic limits of art, while making the visual comprehension of space and the everyday objects that occupy it strangely unfamiliar. Touching many genres but cleaving to none, Artschwager’s work has been variously described as Pop art, because of its derivation from utilitarian objects and incorporation of commercial and industrial materials; as Minimal art, because of its geometric forms and solid presence; and as conceptual art, because of its cool and cerebral detachment. His approach—evolving out of a formation that brings together counter-intelligence and cabinetmaking—focuses on the structures of perception, conflating the visual world of images (painting), which can be apprehended but not physically grasped, and the tactile world of objects (sculpture), which is the same space that we ourselves occupy.

Discovering the potential of synthetic materials has been critical to his project, whether the readymade frisson of vulgar Formica with its color fields, patterns, and sheen; or the suggestiveness of Celotex, the heavily textured, dimensional paper board on which he paints grisaille renderings of photographs (both obscure and topical), landscapes, and parlor scenes. Adopting most of his motifs from common interior surroundings, he has turned tables, chairs, lecterns, mirrors, and other items of furniture into visual riffs. Then there is punctuation (exclamation marks, question marks, brackets) in materials both hard and soft; fuzzy geometric forms or figural reliefs crafted out of stiff rubberized horsehair; “blps” of varying scale appearing surreptitiously in galleries and parks, and on city streets and skylines; and suggestive wooden crate sculptures that evince the dark humor of Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved Ones.