Richard Artschwager
[3] His mother, Eugenia (née Brodsky),[4] an amateur artist and designer who studied at the Corcoran School of Art,[2] was a Jewish Ukrainian.
[3] In the fall of 1944, he enlisted in the United States Army and deployed to England and France to fight in World War II.
Among them was Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, a German general whom he brought to Oslo to be put on trial by the Norwegians for war crimes.
In 1949, taking advantage of the GI Bill, Artschwager began to study with Amédée Ozenfant in Paris for a year.
His work as a furniture maker left its mark on the art he would later create, as a 1960 commission from the Catholic Church to build portable altars for ships inspired him to start producing small wall objects made of wood and Formica.
This led him to consider how to transcend the utilitarianism of tables, chairs, and cabinets,[6] and to seek a mode of artistic expression more consistent with his identity as a craftsman.
During this period, he built a series of small wall objects in wood and Formica, a decorative staple of American kitchens.
Shortly after seeing a painting by Franz Kline, Artschwager discovered Celotex, a rough-textured fiberboard used on ceilings as acoustic paneling,[2] as a medium to enhance the load gesture.
Also from 1962 Artschwager painted grey acrylic monochrome pictures, basing his images on black-and-white photographs, characteristically of modern buildings as shown in property advertisements, as in Apartment House (1964).
Chair, a substitute geometric version, is a work very representative of this period, with the red Formica used to mimic the back rest.
He used them in four basic forms of wood painted nois, as space punctuation: the birth of what the artist called "blps" (a term which has been attributed to dots seen on the screen of a military submarine),[9] which were enlargements of punctuation marks produced in such media as wood, horsehair, and paint that embody the artist's growing taste for linguistic references.
During the years 1971, 1972 and 1973, he explored the theme of very bourgeois interiors, which gave him a sense of stability while working on other paintings during this time of instability.
Artschwager included the dissolution of any visual design on six Celotex paintings in 1972,[2] which depicted the explosive demolition of Traymore Hotel in Atlantic City using photographic reporting.
In the 1980s, there was preponderance of the mirror as object-own furniture to accommodate the reflections, possibly combined with other materials like Celotex, painted wood, and Formica.
[7] Of Artschwager's body of work and recent shows, art critic John Yau notes that the artist has always been "interested in domesticity—tables, chairs—right from the first things ... paintings that were about interiors, houses, but always domesticity was held at a kind of arm's length, and now it seems to me something changed in this most recently completed body of work, which has people in it; it's a different view of domesticity and time.
"[13] Artschwager's "Osama" painting of Osama bin Laden was included in his 2003 exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in London, however, it was not reproduced in the catalog because of its “potentially politically incendiary nature.” The painting was reproduced in a French catalog from Domaine de Kerguehennec (2003) opposite a portrait of George W.
Utilizing the Formica patterns to make references to early 20th-century artists as diverse as Kazimir Malevich and Henri Matisse, they also made a retrospective nod to his first piano sculpture in 1965.
[15] In 1982, the Van Buren/Brazelton/Cutting Gallery in Cambridge, MA put on a show of his drawings from the "Door Window Table Basket Mirror Rug" series.
[16] The Whitney Museum of American Art produced its second Artschwager retrospective in 1988–89, at the time he had been linked to the new Neo-Geo movement.
[18] Artschwager has been credited with influencing 1980s artists like Haim Steinbach, Meyer Vaisman, Ashley Bickerton, and John Armleder.
Sculptor Rachel Harrison paid homage to Artschwager in her 2009 installation at the Venice Biennale by re-creating his Table with Pink Tablecloth.
[4] Louise Lawler included Artschwager in her piece Birdcalls (1972/2008), an audio artwork that transforms the names of famous male artists into a bird song, parroting names such as Beuys, Ruscha and Warhol in a mockery of conditions of privilege and recognition given to male artists at that time.
[19] Richard Artschwager estate is represented by Xavier Hufkens,[20] Brussels, Sprüth Magers, Berlin, and Gagosian Gallery,[21] New York.
