ART CITIES:Bilbao-Richard Artschwager

Richard Artschwager forged a unique path in art from the early 1950s through the early 21st Century, making the visual comprehension of space and the everyday objects that occupy it strangely unfamiliar. His work has been variously described as Pop art, because of its derivation from utilitarian objects and incorporation of commercial and industrial materials; as Minimal art, because of its geometric forms and solid presence; and as Conceptual art, because of its cool and cerebral detachment. But none of these classifications adequately define the aims of an artist who specialized in categorical confusion and worked to reveal the levels of deception involved in pictorial illusionism.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Archive

Designed as an open labyrinth highlighting the main core of Richard Artschwager’s œuvre, the exhibition at Guggenheim Bilbao features a comprehensive selection of paintings and sculptures dating from the early 1960s to the first decade of the 21^st Century: from his first wood and Formica structures and paintings on Celotex to his nylon-bristle sculptures and “corner pieces” including works in horsehair and so-called blps , which the artist began making in 1968 and displaying individually or on a citywide scale. Artschwager, who had a crucial experience as a cabinetmaker at the beginning of his career, always worked toward the fusion of figuration and abstraction, artistic innovation and design, and ironically sought to combine the functional and the useless. With the paintings and sculptures of a long and varied career, Artschwager plots a distinctive course between handcraft and industrialization, encompassing space as well as the objects and beings that inhabit it. He represented places, scenes from everyday life, and common objects such as tables, chairs, and dressers, interpreting them in ordinary, standardized industrial materials such as Formica, Celotex, acrylic  paint, and rubberized horsehair. He also explored pure geometric form, particularly in his sculptures, venturing into abstraction and solid figures evoking a sense of pictorial illusionism.  Stylistically, Artschwager purposely maintained a characteristic ambivalence, challenging the iconographic dogmatism of tendencies (like Pop Art and Minimal Art) that claimed to be antithetical. Rather than allowing any conflict between schools, he practiced a synthesis that included all the elements, however different, and held them together. “What interests me, he declared, is above all the line of demarcation between ordinary things and the ones we recognize as objects of art”. Artschwager’s work continually questions appearance and essence, venturing into the realms of ontology, epistemology, and aesthetics with wit and intelligence. It offers us a delicate and realistic, humorous yet monumental interpretation of the world. Artschwager was originally trained as a microbiologist. After serving in the army during WWII and receiving a BA in 1948 from Cornell University, New York, he studied under Amédée Ozenfant, one of the pioneers of Abstraction. In the early 1950s Artschwager became involved in cabinetmaking, producing simple pieces of furniture. After a ruinous workshop fire at the end of the decade, he began making sculpture using leftover industrial materials, then expanded into painting, drawing, site-specific installation, and photo-based work. Artschwager, influenced by artists such as Marc di Suvero, Claes Oldenburg and Malcom Morley, begins to carve out his own style at the beginning of the 1960s, reverting to the use of Formica, a non-traditional material in sculpture, and celotex, which he considers a pictorial equivalent to Formica. Both enable the inversion between the functional and the aesthetic to be ingested in his works. At the same time, he also started working with found photographs, which he enlarged and used as the basis for a series of black and white paintings. Made on Celotex (a fibreboard with a pronounced texture) and placed in distinctive metallic frames, these works explored themes connected to modern buildings, interiors, domesticity, furniture and working life. Artschwager’s first exhibition took place at the Art Directions Gallery, New York, in 1959; and was followed by the first of many solo exhibitions with Leo Castelli in 1965. His works  followed, in the 1970s, with the so-called “quotation pieces”: two and three-dimensional representations of punctuation marks which, by analogy with their written counterparts, frame ‘space’ and give it a purpose. In the 1990s, Artschwager made a series of sculptures in the form of shipping crates that further blur the distinctions between functional objects and art. Artschwager is well known for playing with the materiality of the artwork. His use of acrylic, whitewash and pastels on Celotex, for example, creates a three-dimensional effect that makes the paintings almost tactile. Or as Artschwager puts it: “Sculpture is for the touch, painting is for the eye. I wanted to make a sculpture for the eye and a painting for the touch.”

Info: Curators: Germano Celantand Manuel Cirauqui, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Avenida Abandoibarra, 2, Bilbao, Duration: 29/2-10/5/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-20:00, www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus