When it first appeared on the art scene in the early 1960's, Richard Artschwager's work seemed situated somewhere between Pop and Minimalism. His boxy sculptures celebrated a reductive geometry while retaining a reference to everyday objects such as chairs, tables and framed pictures. His paintings, linear representations of banal scenes, combined a Pop-style mockery of pictorial illusion and a Minimalist reliance on industrial materials (his favored support was Celotex, a textured ground created from sugarcane pressed over panels).
In the 1980s, the conceptual aspects of his work came to the fore when a younger generation embraced his art as a precursor to their own interest in appropriation and "simulacra." Suddenly, the wood-grain pattern of the Formica veneer that sheathed Artschwager's sculptures was not just retro, but spoke of the "post-natural" state of contemporary reality, while the machine-like Celotex paintings were seen as prescient challenges to the myths of authenticity and self-expression.
The work in Anthony Grant's condensed survey of four decades of Artschwager's work still looks fresh and provocative. Full of visual paradoxes and formal conundrums, the textured paintings and pieces of strange quasi-furniture now seem less about exploding the conventions of modernism than about challenging habits of perception. This show also suggested that Artschwager emerged pretty much full blown: pieces from the 1990s convey the same kind of thematic concerns and visual sleight of hand as those from the 1960s. A notable exception is an unusually direct body of work from 1994 that consists of plywood crates built to suggest the forms of the absent objects that they would enclose - identified in titles as coffins, confessionals, and crosses. These sculptures have a strangely religious specificity and an unsettling funereal quality.
A concurrent show of Artschwager's recent drawings at Nolan/Eckman pointed to a new direction. Done in charcoal and displaying occasional smudges, these drawings are unabashedly hand-drawn, but the images are as deadpan as ever. Many appear to be based on news photos - an aerial view of a train wreck, for instance, or a crowd scene that the title identifies as a group of North Koreans. Several drawings present the contour of a single strange shape, identified variously in titles as a bladder, an arm or hot water bottle. These almost abstract images draw attention to the quirky outline of the surrounding negative space. Here, as in Artschwager's earlier work, we are never quite sure what we are looking at or even if we should bother trying to identify the images. Whether working in two dimensions or three, Artschwager continues to tease us with his deft slippages between the banal and the enigmatic.
