Richard Artschwager, b. 1923

The sculptures of Richard Artschwager resemble things that we know, but not quite. They take forms from everyday life and subject them to perverse revision, thwarting and subverting the viewer’s expectations. While his fundamental insistence on appropriating quotidian objects into the realm of art aligned him to the tenets of his Pop contemporaries, such as Claes Oldenberg, Artschwager’s cerebral approach and lack of interest in emulating the bright colours and advertising of capitalist culture set him outside the borders of Pop.

The present work evinces the dialogue that permeates his oeuvre between the patterned surface of the material and the imposed pattern of the artist. In the present construction the rich, detailed texture of the wood grain is diametrically opposed to the clean, minimalist geometric lines and shapes of the construction. Arranged to echo the regularity of the encasing frame form, the irregularity and complexity of the grain discomfits the eye and destabilises the form, leaving a residual sense of imbalance.

Moreover, closer scrutiny reveals that the wood grain is only the representation of wood grain, present only in its two-dimensional pictorial form, a pattern that does not correspond to touch. Artschwager’s preference for formica stemmed from his formative experiences working in a factory and from the material’s quintessential modernity. It allowed him to confuse the ways that the second and third dimensions are represented, applying the conventions habitually used to depict form and space in illusionistic painting to three-dimensional objects. In Artschwager’s sculpture there is a profound disparity that leaves the viewer with the disturbing sense that the combined evidence of sight and touch by no means add up to the truth about the world. Doubts about perception arise, accumulate and alert the viewer to the inherent weaknesses of his perceptual apparatus.