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Whitney Museum of American Art opens Richard Artschwager exhibition

Whitney Museum of American Art presents a comprehensive retrospective of work by Richard Artschwager, on view October 25, 2012—February 3, 2013.

Richard Artschwager Sitting and Not, 1992. Acrylic and Formica on Celotex with painted wood frame, 75 x 59 in. (190.5 x 149.9 cm). Collection of Harriet and Larry Weiss© Richard Artschwager. Photo: Photo by Adam Reich.

Now 88, Richard Artschwager (b. 1923) has remained steadily at the forefront of contemporary art for fifty years. He began making art in the 1950s, had his first one-person exhibition at the age of 42 at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1965, and made his first appearance in a Whitney Annual in 1966. Associated with Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptual art, he has never fit neatly into any of these categories. His work has consistently explored questions regarding his own visual and physical engagement with the world; his objects straddle the line between illusion and reality. As curator Jennifer Gross notes in her catalogue essay, “Artschwager’s presence in the art world blurred all the set categories. His pictures and objects sobered up Pop, lightened up Minimalism, and made Conceptual art something other than just a thinking man’s game. How could someone remain so methodically committed to the formal values of sculpture and painting … yet also keep his insouciant finger so firmly on the pulse of an art culture that was being thoroughly upended by media culture?”

Artschwager’s work reveals the artist’s prescience in his career-long commitment to exploring the profound effect photography and technology have had in transforming our engagement with the world. His work has responded to and challenged how these media – and our experience of things as images rather than as things in themselves – have shifted human experience from being rooted in primary physical experience to a knowledge mediated by secondary sources such as newspapers, television, and the Internet.

Artschwager has long made use of commercial and industrial materials in his work. Having created furniture out of wood throughout much of the 1950s, he began to incorporate Formica into his art, calling it “the great ugly material, the horror of the age, which I came to like suddenly…it looked as if wood had passed through it, as if the thing only half existed…But it’s a picture of something at the same time, it’s an object.” Similarly, he began in 1962 to paint on Celotex fiberboard, an inexpensive construction material with a rough surface that gives his painted works the look of something distantly recalled.

Organized by the Whitney in association with the Yale University Art Gallery, and curated by Jennifer Gross, Seymour H. Knox, Jr. Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, Yale University Art Gallery.

For general information, please call (212) 570-3600 or visit whitney.org.