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.
