Richard Artschwager

Richard Artschwager was an American painter, illustrator and sculptor, born in 1923 in Washington, D.C.. Artschwager is best known for his association with the Op Art movement.

Early Life and Art

Richard Artschwager was born to European immigrant parents. His father, Ernst Artschwager, was a Protestant born in Prussia, who suffered greatly from tuberculosis. His mother, Eugene Brodsky, was a Jewish Ukrainian, who studied at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, then at the National Academy of Design in New York. It is from his mother that Artschwager received his love of art. In 1935, the family moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico because of the deteriorating health of his father. At that time, Artschwager was already showing a knack for drawing.

In 1941, Artschwager entered Cornell University, where he studied chemistry and mathematics. In the fall of 1944, he was sent to England and France to fight in World War II, as part of his military service. Wounded in the head, he was assigned administrative duty in Frankfurt, then an intelligence posting in Vienna. It was there that he met his wife, Elfriede Wejmelka. The two married in 1946 and returned to the United States in 1947. Artschwager then returned to college and, in February 1948, graduated with a [Bachelor of Arts] in physics.

Artschwager, however, couldn't deny his first passion and was encouraged into the arts by his wife. After he received his diploma, the couple moved to New York, where he works as baby photographer and his wife worked as a designer.

In 1949, Artschwager began to study with Amédée Ozenfant in Paris. Ozenfant was a purist painter, who placed precision and rationality above all else. In the early 1950s, Artschwager abandoned art for work, particularly as a turner and a bank employee. In 1953, he began to sell furniture, to ensure regular income, after the birth of his daughter. In 1956, he designed and manufactured simple and modern furniture. He was quite successful until 1958, when a fire destroyed his entire studio and all its contents. He then contracted a large loan to restore his business.

Return to Art

While he was working to support his family, Artschwager continued to think about art. This was during a time when abstract expressionism reigned supreme. He enrolled in a nude workshop and painted in abstract easel format, derived from landscape painting. His paintings and drawings from this period were exhibited in two group shows at the Terrain Gallery in 1957 and in October 1959 at the Art Directions Gallery on Madison Avenue, where they were recognized by Donald Judd.

In 1960, Artschwager received a commission from the Catholic Church to design functional objects like altars for boats that went beyond utilitarianism. This work lead him to think of 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.

In 1961, he takes a snapshot of a dustbin. The quadrille photo was implemented and expanded on the canvas. Shortly after, seeing a painting by Franz Kline, Artswager discovered celotex as a medium to enhance the load gesture. In 1962, he directed his first combination work, using painting and celotex sculpture(Portrait Portrait I and II).

At the end of 1963, Artschwager was very productive. Chair, a substitute geometric version, is a work very representative of this period, with the red formica used to mimic the back rest.

In the mid-'60s, Artschwager made small framed objects from formica. He sought to incorporate, for the first time, human presence into his sculptures. His paintings on celotex during this period show essentially opposite characters. His diptychs show his first attempt to incorporate space in the table. From 1964, his paintings depict images of the environment, carefully framed with formica. He met Karp and Castelli, two gallery owners who appreciated his work and exhibited it in group exhibitions during the Spring and Autumn of 1964.

First Exhibits

In January 1965, Artschwager finally had his first solo exhibit at Castelli. He explored the problems of perception of space, a more elaborate construction and decoration. He also worked with portable altars. In 1965, the keyboard he had played since his childhood, appeared in his work as an installation format architecture. Artschwager's efforts to animate the space became increasingly sophisticated. He exploited the traditional functions and duties of furniture in space. Throughout the 1960s, he produced many figurative paintings from photographs. He integrated time and movement in his paintings and then process perspective as a convention to create the illusion of space.

In 1966, he inaugurated a series using mottled brown formica, a series that was the subject of his second solo exhibit at Castelli in late 1967. His original works of furniture was becoming more advanced, especially through his wall pieces. At the same time, he continued to produce many abstract paintings, which used spatial concerns marbled wall furniture. He drew a series of landscapes, which he used to prepare an exhibit commissioned by the University of California in the Spring of 1968. He used them in four basic forms of wood painted nois, as space punctuation: the birth of BLPs, enlargements of punctuation marks that embody the artist's growing taste for linguistic references. The BLPs were the sole subject of his first solo exhibit in Europe Aat the Konrad Fischer gallery in Düsseldorf in 1968.

At the end of 1968, he participated in the annual exhibit of sculpture at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It put BLPs in a hundred different places in the museum, which drew attention to the architecture of [Marcel Breuer|Breuer] and the works exhibited. They were used to publicly questionined the institutional context of art.

In 1970, he participated in the group exhibit Information at connor harman.

Architectural Works

In the 1970s, Artschwager begins to work on architectural motifs. During the first half of the decade, he employed two processes - fragmentation and expansion. His theme was domestic interiors. He also included associations of various styles of furniture, gradually moving away from the rudimentary nature of them.

During the years 1971, 1972 and 1973, he explored the theme 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 6 celotex paintings, which depicted the explosive demolition of Traymore Hotel in Atlantic City using photographic reporting.

In 1974, he developed classic architectural motifs, a compromise between the stillness of the interiors and the ongoing disintegration of destruction. The subject here is light, its ability to guide the eye, the movement's vision and the constant movement and fluid look. A series of imaginary drawings, representing all six items combined (a door, a window, a table, a basket, mirror, rug), uses inversions of scale, imaginative combinations and locations. This reflection on the spaces capable of containing all six, which is also a question about the context, causes them to turn again to the BLPs.

The next five years, his production is essentially three dimensional. He added to his works very large BLPs.

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.

In 1984 and 1985, he used painted wood and remained very active. This design occupies a central place in his creative process.

References

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External links

• Richard Artschwager at David Nolan Gallery
• Richard Artschwager at Brooke Alexander Gallery
• Richard Artschwager at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels