Richard Artschwager (1923–2013) was 42 when he had his first solo show. The exhibition, which was at Leo Castelli gallery, included the Formica sculpture “Table with Pink Tablecloth” (1964), now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The pink top of the short, square box represents a tablecloth; on each side of the box a corner of the tablecloth hangs down between the table legs. The negative space underneath the table is rendered as a flat black void. The impenetrable cube is both a picture and an object. Although the work had affinities with Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art, it did not fit into these categories or any others. Artschwager was a maverick from the outset. 

Artschwager once described his cube as “the way a table with a tablecloth is in a painting, in a still life — a three-dimensional still life,” calling attention to the deceptions inherent in pictorial illusionism. However, I would claim that his deceptions had as much to do with his life as they did with his art, particularly his assignment in World War II to move high-ranking German POWs across Europe, often so they could stand trial for war crimes.

This thought came to me when I visited Richard Artschwager: Boxed In, an exhibition celebrating the centennial of the artist’s birth at David Nolan Gallery and saw a photograph of Artschwager standing next to Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, a German general whom he transported to Norway to stand trial. Seeing the photograph reminded me of something Artschwager said to me a few years before he died. The gist of it went like this: In order to be effective as an interrogator, you had to befriend your prisoner and get him to trust you; you had to pretend to be sympathetic. 

I think Artschwager’s experience with institutionally sanctioned duplicity was one of the strongest influences on his work. Even at his most formal, his art is not only about art, certainly no more than Jasper Johns’s “Flag” (1954–55) is just about a flat piece of colored cloth. His cool surface or use of rubberized hair to make a body suggests that something is being kept under wraps or has gone terribly wrong, and that perhaps there is no place of sustained comfort. 

What are we to make of the fact that something is askew in each of the three perfectly made Formica cubes, mimicking tables, in the current exhibition? “Table (Wannabe)” (2009), which is one of an edition, is only 12 inches high. Does it wish to be bigger and unique? The negative space between the four legs is mint green, for which light and shadow cannot account. In “Small Red Table” (2008), the negative space on the four sides alternates between red and green. These unexplained changes are part of what holds our attention — we see the object but cannot explain the color choices. The tables exist in our world, but we cannot access their world. We have become estranged from the things around us. 

Also part of Artschwager’s diverse oeuvre are his drawings. Except for the title, I think the linear ink drawing “Door, Window, Table, Basket, Mirror, Rug” (1974) fits right in with one of the great postwar series of drawings, documented in the publication, Basket Table, Door, Window, Mirror, Rug: 53 Drawings (Leo Castelli, 1974). In this recombinant series, Artschwager maintained the essential features of each object while subjecting it to scale shifts and receding perspective. By using perspective and scale to attain something unexpected and even surprising, he suggests that distortion is integral to every set of rules. 

Four of Artschwager’s wood shipping crates, collectively titled “Untitled (1000 cubic inches)” (1996), are also in the exhibition. In these, we encounter a sealed-off world. The shape of each box conforms to its invisible contents, leaving the viewer to surmise as to what’s inside. 

Artschwager’s interest in surfaces is unrivaled. Along with smooth, shiny Formica, he used fabricated bristles, rubberized horsehair, glass mirrors, melamine laminate, rubber, velvet, flocking, chrome-plated brass — non-art materials you don’t necessarily find in a hardware store. He was interested in anonymous graffiti, or what he called a “blp.” Made of Formica and painted wood, his “Quotation Marks” (1980) sculptures are literally quotation marks on the wall. What is being cited? That absence is moving; it is as if the content has been erased. What legacy have we already forgotten? 

After many years of drawing only in black and white, Artschwager took up pastel. One of three examples on view (along with “Yellow Window,” 2007, and “Orange Wall,” 2008), “Untitled (Red bookcase)” (2006) was rendered on flocked paper, resulting in a sensuous surface enhanced by the warm color. And yet, inviting as the red surface is, the cropping and the oversized overhead lamp, jutting down from the top edge, don’t sit right. Something seems odd and foreboding about the color and scale of the things within the drawing that cannot be explained away. 

In “Running Man (triple)” (2013), made the year he died, we see three smooth, identical silhouettes in different colors running from left to right across a rough, gray field made of Celotex. The diminishing height of the figures suggests they are in a receding in space. Why are they running? What are they running away from or toward? Artschwager never specifies. 

My only quibble about the exhibition is the absence of any paintings on Celotex, a coarse surface insulation board on which the artist began painting in the early 1960s, before his debut exhibition. Among other things, the ragged surface makes mastery impossible. Artschwager is quoted on the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s website as saying “Celotex … had this roughness, the look of pinhole photographs. You see, it replaced the human touch that the photo didn’t have. … I wanted something that had the feel of drawing, the character of painting, and introduced the look of mechanical reproduction.”

This is another side of Artschwager that has not been explored enough. He had a high regard for the masterpiece tradition and all the skill and knowledge it required, but he was not nostalgic. He felt that the tradition had been broken by the war. 

Seeing the photograph of Artschwager standing next to General Falkenhorst, I began thinking about the fact that he was bilingual, learning both English and German as a child. The son of immigrants, he was an outsider from the beginning and never forgot that. He enlisted in the army, but because of a head wound he ended up transporting German prisoners — largely, I suspect, because he spoke German. Remembering what he said about being an interrogator, I wondered if the well-known words of the cartoon character Pogo had come to his mind: “We have met the enemy and it is us.”

Richard Artschwager: Boxed In continues at David Nolan Gallery (24 East 81st Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through January 20. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.

Richard Artschwager (1923–2013) was a maestro of shape-shifting sculptures, tricky dematerializations, and other feats of visual and semiotic mischief. He possessed an enduring fascination with the unremarkable and defamiliarized the most commonplace, ersatz building materials—such as Formica, Celotex, and melamine laminate—in order to create objects that opened up new fields of meaning. He utilized elements and forms so ubiquitous that they tended to be overlooked or not thought about at all, perennially challenging the viewer to see differently and more deeply.

Paradoxically, banality itself proved to be inexhaustibly useful to Artschwager, who stealthily weaponized it to critique art while tinkering with our visual and cognitive faculties. His approach was likely fueled in part by his studies with painter Amédée Ozenfant (1886–1966), a cofounder of the Purism movement, with whom he would have encountered the precepts of European vanguardism. Equally influential was his early stint as a cabinetmaker, as evidenced by the artist’s faux furniture sculptures and obdurately strange decorative fixtures.

The exhibition here, “Boxed In,” celebrated the centennial of Artschwager’s birth in very intimate fashion by focusing, in part, on notational drawings and etchings that centered the overriding concerns of the artist’s six-decade-plus career, as one noticed across a trio of drawings: Untitled (Six Objects), 1974, a loosely gridded arrangement of modular rectilinear forms executed in ink; Door, Window, Table, Basket, Mirror, Rug, 1974, a stripped-down, perspectival rendering of the titular items, also done in ink; and Six Objects, 1975, an ink-and-graphite-on-paper triptych featuring the DNA of the two aforementioned works—a comical take on generic furnishings, delightfully mutated.

Small-scale sculptures and editions—some familiar, some not, many produced during the twenty-first century—were interspersed with a selection of iconic works. These included three colorful laminated cubic sculptures, made between 2008 and 2009, masquerading as wood-grained tables. Formica is the primary material in Fractal, Book, and Door, all 1987, and a fantastic pair of Quotation Marks, 1980. Just over fifteen inches high, these bits of punctuation are imminently portable and can be installed as is or can surround other works of art, distinguishing certain objects from others or indicating their double meaning. 

Artswchager’s autonomous objects are tangentially indexed to the everyday world by virtue of their materials. And though they bump into the precincts of Minimalism and Conceptualism, they often dive deep into the realms of Surrealism. Take two Hair Box sculptures, from 1969 and 1990, respectively, made from rubberized horsehair, which have no distinct counterparts in the world at large. Similarly, Artschwager’s well-known “blps”—as he titled a series of oval lozenge forms, both flat and dimensional—are also sui generis. In Locations, 1969, the blps—crafted from melamine laminate, wood, mirrors, rubberized horsehair, rubber, and acrylic—are installed against bright sunshine-yellow walls and clustered together in an “artful” arrangement that takes its cues from 1960s modernist decor by way of Star Trek. But the blps eventually broke free of any compositional constraints, roaming around the gallery in out-of-the-way places to activate the space. However, a big fat bristling Brush Blp, 1988, was captured for display and showcased in a Plexiglas vitrine.

We can count Artschwager as a Pop artist, but his affinities with other “-isms” are vast. He located himself in the overlap of sundry art movements and flourished. Artschwager was slippery, surprising, and sly—an artist for all seasons, truly.

“I am not what I am.” Ominous words spoken by Iago in Othello, but in the case of Richard Artschwager a definition of aesthetic principle. We can change the meaning of Shakespeare’s words by simply changing the context in which they appear, an idea that comes to the point of practically every piece included in David Nolan Gallery’s comprehensive yet comprehensible celebration of Artschwager’s centennial. A protean shapeshifter, Artschwager (1923–2013) has been called a furniture designer, a Pop artist, an installation artist, a conceptualist—not to mention his work in glass or his landscape drawings. The common thread linking all these identities is that of the perceiver and interpreter of given reality. Artschwager’s work is a rejoinder to Heidegger’s idea of “thrownness,” that we humans are tossed into a world we haven’t made and obliged to live in ways we haven’t ourselves chosen. Artschwager turns Heidegger upside down, remaking the world by taking objects out of their given context and thoroughly reimagining them.

The thirty-four works in the show cover six decades of artistic production, from the late 1950s until the artist’s death in 2013 and include objects of all sorts as well as works on paper—drawings in ink or graphite, pastels, and one watercolor. That strange, untitled watercolor (c. 1958/59), a vaguely desert landscape with a flattened perspective and a drawn frame that excludes all but the essential, reminds us that Artschwager first learned to draw with his mother Eugenia when the family moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1935. By the time he reached the end of the 1960s, Artschwager had become a different artist. Hair Box (1969) is a disquieting piece, perhaps a descendent of Meret Oppenheim’s furry teacups but certainly not in the same humorous way. Hair Box has sexual implications, especially because “box” is slang for the vagina. Artschwager’s sculpture is geometrically precise, angled like a male urinal, leaving us to wonder about its meaning. The other Hair Box in the show, from 1990 and also a wall piece, is only partially open. What was possibly sexual in 1969 becomes a sendup of Minimalism two decades later, a parody of Judd-style wall boxes made of rubberized hair.

Work from the 1970s represented here is quintessential Artschwager. Untitled (Box with drawers) (1971) is an everyday object, made from a box of white oak and fitted with five drawers and brass hardware, transformed into art. We might link it with Dalí’s Venus de Milo aux Tiroirs (Venus de Milo with Drawers) (1936). Dalí “opens” the Venus de Milo sexually and psychologically, while Artschwager first renders a utilitarian object absurd by turning the drawers into psychological conundrums: one is a mirror, another has no bottom. The drawers then become devices to open our minds to the possibilities entailed in peering into the hidden, perhaps illusory spaces of our subconscious. Four Approximate Objects (1970-91) plays with the same idea of the ordinary box as a portable Wunderkammer. To open the box is to peer into a mind and examine its mysteries, simultaneously familiar and strange. Artschwager’s affinities with Surrealism are strong, especially in the sense that these two boxes become mirrors held up to the mind of the beholder, doors that open onto our secret life.

The works from the 1980s continue Artschwager’s experiments with defamiliarization. Quotation Marks (1980) accomplishes several things: first, the idea of quotation, parodied here because there is nothing between the marks, and second, the gesture we make when we draw imaginary quotation marks with our hands to signal irony. Succinct and elegant, Artschwager’s quotation marks suggest we not take the entire universe, everything between the marks, too seriously. Fractal (1987), a Formica and wood wall piece, is a conceptual representation of its title. In fractals the part is a miniature version of the whole, so this piece constitutes a metaphor for infinity. Mirror(1988), Formica and enamel on wood, is yet another defiance of utility. You can’t see your reflection in this mirror, so perhaps you don’t really exist. Maybe, like Alice and her looking glass, we are only figments of someone else’s imagination. Artschwager suggests volumes in a modestly sized structure.

Artschwager’s work from the 1990s and first decade of the aughts move further into irony. Three anti-tables allude to his work as a furniture maker, which, during the 1950s was how he earned a living. But Small Red Table(2008), Table (Drop Leaf) (2008), and Table (Wannabe) (2009) are only tables because he calls them tables. Each is a block with faux trompe-l’oeilspaces between the non-existent legs. Wannabe is the most complex of the three because it is topped with an imaginary tablecloth. In one fell swoop, Artschwager manages to parody Minimalism and to hearken back to a still life tradition that runs from seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting to Cubism. The illusion is that there is no illusion: what you see is not what you get.

David Nolan painted the gallery space facing 81st Street yellow in homage to Artschwager, who had the façade of Nolan’s Chelsea gallery space painted the same color when he designed it. A fitting tribute to this great artist from his long-time dealer.