Richard Artschwager
May 2–August 29, 2009
Berlin
Sprüth Magers Berlin is delighted to present an exhibition of new works by American artist Richard Artschwager. Extending the strategies he has deployed since the 1960s to challenge assumptions about perception and the aesthetic, material and spatial experience of art and the everyday, the paintings and sculptures assembled provide an ideal introduction to the range within Artschwager’s practice, and the unity of philosophical enquiry which binds these diverse works together. Artschwager’s work is typically characterised by playful and provocative slippages between different media. This exhibition encompasses sculptures defined as much by colouration and their painterly elements as they are by their forms and materials, together with paintings which rely on texture and surface to acquire meaning.
Artschwager’s sculptural practice, epitomised by his iconic Table with Pink Table Cloth (1964), addresses the shapes created and spaces defined by familiar, often domestic objects, and investigates the viewer’s experience of them through material incongruities and unexpected interventions of line and colour. Simple blocks of wood and formica evoke the elemental forms of objects like tables, chairs or pianos, yet the perception of depth and surface is delineated and disrupted in intriguing ways. Where one expects to find empty space under a table, the viewer finds instead the differently coloured planes painted onto the side of a rectangular block. Similarly, the distorted scale of a chair forces the viewer to look newly askance at such an everyday object. These works, recently realized for the first time from sketches done in the 1960s, might be sculptures that have been painted on, paintings installed on a three-dimensional supporting structure, or both simultaneously. This teasing ambiguity points to Artschwager’s concern to explore the tensions and contradictions inherent in the task of grasping and defining familiar objects and experiences, which is an abiding motif in his work.
