This show of Richard Artschwager's drawings and sculpture, "Objects as Images of Objects: 1966-2008," made it quite clear that the artist is nobody's mimic. Starting in the late 1960's, Artschwager has been referred to as a Minimalist, a Conceptualist, a borrower of Pop, and more recently, a forefather of Neo-Geo. But as demonstrated here, Artschwager (who is now in his mid-80's) continues to produce original and sophisticated work that is in the moment as well as visually and conceptually compelling.
"Objects" comprised some two dozen works on paper, complemented by a sampling of sculpture in, variously, acrylic, enamel, Formica, rubberized horsehair and wood. A brilliantly inventive lounge chair of oak, Formica, cowhide and painted steel recalls the artist's 1950s origins as a fine cabinetmaker.
This show inaugurated David Nolan's new location in Chelsea, and Artschwager himself designed the gallery's street-level facade. He created a bold minimalist grid consisting of four transom windows fitted with mirrored glass (which reflect the sky and buildings across the street), a centrally divided plate-class window ane two towering white enamel doors. These stark geometries are surrounded by bands of cadmium yellow, all set against an ebony black exterior wall.
Intense color is also employed in a striking selection of lanascape drawings from 2007 and 2008, inspired by the artist's recent trips to Ireland and the southwestern United States. In keeping with Artschwager's penchant for mixing two- and three-dimensional perceptual experiences, these scroll-like works in charcoal and oil pastel (including a mesmerizing oil pastel on red velvet) evoke Native American textiles. Layered images of desert, brush, mountain and sky unfurl vertically along the coarsely textured paper in ornate patterns of emerald greens and rich earth tones. Typical for Artschwager is the way in which quotidian motifs, such as the endless highway in Macadam (2008), suddenly loom up in the foreground as though they possessed a life of their own.
The show abounded in such perceptual vagaries. Yellow Window (2007), for example, appears to be a drawing of a roll of toilet tissue on a sheet of cadmium yellow paper. On closer inspection, the "toilet tissue" proves to be a depiction of a sheet of paper with faint markings suggesting a desert landscape.
Also on hand were several early minimalist line studies, their vertical or horizontal trails of charcoal traversing the paper like fibers scrutinized through the lens of a microscope. In Triple Lines (1969), dense shadows run along the undersides of lines that seem, in themselves, palpable; elsewhere, gossamer smudges of charcoal suggest little more than smoke. Cleverly resisting clean resolution, the drawing reflects bot the certainties and ambiguities of visual cognition.
-Gregory Galligan
