John Chamberlain

Galerie Pierre Huber, Geneva
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1987

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is brighter and more saturated in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals some light surface dirt has deposited in the recesses. All other surface irregularities are in keeping with the artist's working process and choice of medium.
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Throughout his highly acclaimed career, John Chamberlain worked with metal, polyester resin and even urethane foam, but it is his sculptures made from assembled steel car parts that are most synonymous with his practice. The artist started using leftover scraps of metal in the late 1950s as a result of having run out of the iron rod with which he was working, and immediately felt compelled to use the coloured and bent shapes as collage. The sculptor once reflected: “I wasn’t interested in the car parts per se, I was interested in either the colour or the shape or the amount. I didn’t want engine parts, I didn’t want wheels…Just the sheet metal…You choose the material at a time when that’s the material you want to use, and then you develop your processes so that when you put things together it gives you a sense of satisfaction” (the artist quoted in: Julie Sylvester, John Chamberlain: A Catalogue Raisonné of Sculpture 1954 – 1985, New York 1986, p. 15). Executed in 1987, Garuda encapsulates Chamberlain’s artistic vision, its folded and painted parts coming together into a beautifully balanced and proud-standing form.

In Garuda, sheets of steel have been assembled together as if clenched by a giant fist. The metal pleats in intricate ways, bending into almost impossible forms that have been later coloured in vibrant hues of blue, yellow and red. In the present work, the artist’s ability to weld discarded pieces of metal reveals an extraordinary sensibility that allowed him to choose the right elements and combine them to create lyrical and dynamic forms of poetic stance. In the same way he chose the separate metal parts that formed them, Chamberlain also chose for his sculptures names of poetic resonance. Having befriended many poets as a student at the Black Mountain College and even written poems, although he never considered himself a poet, the artist found particular pleasure in titling his works. Through his love of language and wordplay, the artist would choose words that had unusual sounds, or whose typographic shapes he liked, but would rarely associate their meanings to the sculpture they were meant for. In the case of Garuda, however, one easily finds parallels between the physical object and the connotations of its title. Garuda is the name of a large bird-like creature that appears in Hindu and Buddhist mythology, and the elongated sheets of vividly coloured steel in the present work may well be likened to the feathers of the magical animal. Like a phoenix that has risen from the ashes, steel that once belonged to a car and was discarded was chosen and modelled together by Chamberlain to become in Garuda an elegant example of his dominion of the medium, a beautiful composition full of rhythm and energy.