RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER: BOXED IN: Celebrating the Artist's Centennial

David Nolan Gallery is delighted to announce Richard Artschwager: Boxed In, an exhibition celebrating the centennial of the iconoclastic artist’s birth. On view from December 15, 2023 to January 20, 2024, the exhibition will include drawings, paintings and sculptures spanning six decades of Artschwager’s impressive and protean oeuvre.

Born on December 26, 1923, Artschwager was always amused by the fact that his birthday was known as Boxing Day in many countries — a fact that is itself amusing given the artist’s refusal to be boxed in as any particular type of artist. While often mentioned in relation to such diverse artists as Edouard Vuillard, Georges Seurat, Giorgio Morandi, Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, and Bruce Nauman, Artschwager moved through different mediums, materials, and visual preoccupations with a voraciousness, intelligence and wit that allowed him to escape any box the art world might have wanted to construct around him.

And yet, Artschwager would return to boxes, squares and rectangles throughout his career, employing them as framing devices to emphasize an object’s physical presence, and in turn our own experience of viewing the work. Mirrors, too, brought the viewer into the work (literally) and extended the picture plane into the physical world. Even his blps — those iconic, lozenge-shaped voids he installed in public places with the illicit delight of a graffiti artist — were driven by a deep critical engagement with the process of looking. Though Artschwager’s stated ambition may have been to “be original,” one might argue that his ultimate aim was more humanistic: to get us to look closely at the world around us and, through seeing, to begin to know it.

Take, for instance, one of his early sculptures, Description of a Table (1964), and its subsequent variations: a plywood box covered in Formica, with a woodgrain pattern to resemble the legs and top of a table, and black and white laminates to convey a spatial void and a tablecloth, respectively. In creating a flat representation (in Formica) of a dimensional object (a table) on another dimensional object (a wooden cube), Artschwager challenges not only our optical perception, but also our cognitive understanding of what constitutes a table. This deliberate confusion of the pictorial and the sculptural, often infused with a sense of irony and irreverence, runs throughout his work — a desire both to entertain and to disrupt our experience of the world. 

Artschwager was playfully subversive in his choice of materials as well, eschewing canvas, brass and bronze for the cheap commercial stuff of everyday American life: the aforementioned Formica with its faux woodgrain and marble veneers, the rough fibers of Celotex ceiling tile that disturbed the surface of his paintings, the rubberized horsehair he removed from its original context as an upholstery filling and made visible outside of its furniture. One suspects that, more than exalting these materials in particular, the artist is urging viewers to a greater regard for all things ordinary, a willingness to see everything as worthy of extended observation.

Artschwager was adept at destabilizing the audience’s perspective on a large scale, too, as when he exhibited a collection of handmade shipping crates, transforming the containers of artwork into the artwork itself. True to his capacity for endlessly investigating a single subject, he would go on to make 100 of these crates over the years, shaped as the imaginary sculpture or painting they could possibly house, before making miniature sets of them that became beloved domestic objects. (The Formica tables underwent a similar miniaturization, testament to his perpetual fascination with scale.)

The more mundane the object, it seems, the more appealing it was as fodder for Artschwager’s fertile imagination, and none were more banal than the six — Door, Window, Table, Basket, Mirror, Rug — that together ignited a multi-decade obsession beginning in the 1970s. Through drawings, paintings, objects and multiples, he generated hundreds of permutations of these domestic objects, variously exaggerating perspective, surface and scale to often surreal and comic effect. Artschwager’s highest devotion, perhaps, was not to art but to the art of looking, and looking long enough to see the world as it is: strange, weird, funny, and wonderfully confounding.

Richard was rigorous and exacting in his own eccentric way. He was an artist, a scientist, and a philosopher with a Beckett-like sense of humor. Through his work, he demanded freedom of thought and spirit, and he was always looking for connections among objects, literature and the environment. He was absolutely brilliant, bursting with brains and wildly imaginative. That’s part of why so many artists across generations and around the world continue to admire him so much. - David Nolan