Richard Artschwager

I felt I had the right to be out there on my own as an absolute secular artist, looking at reality. 
—Richard Artschwager

Gagosian is pleased to present Primary Sources, an exhibition of works by the late Richard Artschwager. This is the first time that key paintings and drawings will be shown with materials from the artist’s personal archive, spanning the 1960s to his death in 2013.

For five decades, Artschwager forged a maverick path by confounding the traditional limits of art and reconfiguring the visual comprehension of space. Associated with many genres but cleaving to none, Artschwager’s art has been variously described as Pop, Minimal, and Conceptual. Focusing on the structures of perception, his work conflates the visual world of images (painting) and the tactile world of objects (sculpture), with inspirations ranging from counterintelligence to cabinetry.

Synthetic materials were critical to Artschwager’s project. He worked frequently with Celotex, a heavily textured, obdurate compound board that allows brushstrokes to remain palpable, producing grisaille paintings of images both topical and obscure, from newspaper photographs to landscapes and interiors.