Left Bank Art think Pink Ii Abstract Canvas Art by Leftbank Art
 |
| A wooden book finished in Formica...a news photo painted on a Celotex ceiling panel...is information technology real art or fraudulent art? |
One of the hardest concepts to convey in art is the concept of conceptual art. Landscapes are easy to understand. Still-lifes sometimes have embedded within them all way of subconscious meanings, but unremarkably they're more than laden with nostalgia than profundity. Portraits ofttimes bargain with complex and profound character traits far beyond the subject'south mere likeness...but that'south rare. Even Abstruse Expressionism has a concrete aesthetic foundation upon which to build an understanding of the bones fine art elements from which it is conceived. Conceptual art, on the other manus, frequently stretches the very definition of art nearly to the breaking point...sometimes even across. Is the creative person using some readymade object in making a valid point, or just deceiving the viewer into accepting virtually anything as art, provided it is isolated from its natural surroundings and perhaps labeled with some dubious distinction and title. Very often gallery and museum space devoted to conceptual art appears more as a sophisticated hoax than high fine art. He didn't showtime out with this in mind, but the American illustrator, painter, and sculptor, Richard Artschwager, became one of the primeval and best conceptual artists.
 |
| The caput and easily behind a career of more than than fifty years. |
When Richard Artschwager was born in 1923, conceptual art was barely more a figment of Marcel Duchamp's fertile imagination. His Fountain from the wall of a men's room had made for some interesting intellectual calisthenics among the jurying artists of the famed 1913 Arsenal Show in New York City, but information technology had, after all, been rejected, ending up ignominiously discarded in a back alley. Even the avant garde of the high-flown, New York fine art world were non ready for conceptual art, particularly that involving porcelain plumbing equipment. Even by 1941, as this son of German language-born immigrants entered Cornell University to written report chemistry and mathematics, cutting edge art was barely daring to explore paint splattering and Cubist constructions so rarified the artists oftentimes couldn't come up with conventional titles, finding themselves merely numbering their works instead. Art was centered on feelings rather than ideas.
 |
| Hospital Ward, Richard Artschwager, acrylics on Celotex panel. |
World War Two didn't change much in that regard except to stir the pot, sending Artschwager off to Germany and exposure to the remnants of German Expressionism, while bringing others of their ilk scurrying to the Us in search personal safety and the presumably open-minded freedom to explore the unknown frontiers of the ultimate "fine art for art's sake" as seen in the New York School. Back in the U.S. by 1948, Richard Artschwager decided to chuck his hard-earned Bachelor of Science caste in physics to indulge his commencement loves--his new wife, an even newer daughter, and art. The closest he could come to satisfying all three was to piece of work every bit a New York City baby photographer. Fifty-fifty that he was often forced to put aside to earn a living as a banking concern teller and piece of furniture salesman.
 |
| An altar styled after a packing crate...how...interesting. |
By 1956 even so, Artschwager had turned his artistic impulses toward the design and manu-factured of simple, practical, mod-ern furniture. His work as a furniture maker was afterwards to exit its mark on the art he would create. In 1960 Artschwager scor-ed a commission from the Catholic Church to design and build portable altars for ships (left), which inspired him to start producing small wall objects made of wood and Formica. Moreover he was quite good at this new art form and surprisingly successful until 1958, when tra-gedy struck. A burn down destroyed his entire studio and all its contents. Undeterred, Artschwager took out a big loan to restart his busi-ness.
 |
| Cradle, 1967, Richard Artschwager |
Designing and building article of furniture set Artschwager thinking nigh furniture, not every bit commonsensical furnishings just conceptually--thinking about their shapes, their purposes, their sculptural elements. By the 1960s, Artschwager was becoming a nascent conceptual creative person at a time when Abstract Expressionism and even Modern Art in full general were starting to run their grade. Popular lay on the horizon; action painting and the emotional upheavals which drove information technology were starting to become tiresome even as Minimalism pointed the style to the nihilism marker the death of virtually a century of Modernism. Artschwager slowly began to motility away from producing art for fine art'southward sake but to using art conceptually to explore ideas and ethics.
 |
| Formica over wood. Comfort means zero. Merely f orm and conceptual role governed Artschwager's chairs-- sculpture for the eyes. |
In 1961, Artschwager discovered Celotex, a rough-textured fiberboard used on ceilings equally acoustic paneling. Artschwager'southward paintings on Celotex during 1960s demonstrate essentially opposite characters. His paintings draw images of the environment, carefully framed with Formica. He met gallerist Leo Castelli, who liked his work and exhibited information technology in grouping exhibitions during 1964. Artschwager often used Formica that looked like burl wood, a deformity in the grain acquired by trees under stress. As practical to modern geometric forms, Artschwager made sculptures that have the strange sense of being ordinary objects while simultaneously beingness pictures of objects. Every bit a back up for paintings focusing on architectural subjects culled from photos in newspapers, magazines, and books, Artschwager used Celotex panels rather than canvas. Its random blueprint of surface texture captures little puddles of thinned acrylic pigment, blurring any image painted on it. The Celotex makes painted images every bit fuzzy equally a bad Television receiver picture. The bulky silver frame gives the dissolving scene some heft, simply something besides seems askew. It takes a moment to realize that the limerick'southward perspective is out of whack. Artschwager uses these backdrop to his advantage as seen in Devastation III and Destruction 4 (below) based on the explosive demolition photos of the Traymore Hotel in Atlantic City.
 |
| A scene of destruction painted on a building construction material chosen Celotex. |
Much of Artschwager'south sculpture produced in the 1960s and afterward relates to the so prevailing Minimalism every bit the creative person viewed his Formica surfaced furniture as a distillation, every bit seen in his Tabular array with Pinkish Tablecloth (below), which appears to reflect his similar treatment of chairs, pianos, clocks, doors, and other domestic items. And finally, in more than contempo years, Artschwager has tended to dispense with various synthetic pieces in favor of installations starting with his 1976 Leave--Don't Fight City Hall (bottom) which he ready in a ground floor hallway of New York's Museum of Modern Fine art. Past painting the word "exit" on each of five hanging lights, Artschwager demonstrated that conceptual art does non always demand the sterile environs of white-on-white gallery space to be effective. Following many honors, exhibitions, and retrospectives, Richard Artschwager died in February, 2013, later on a cursory illness. He was lxxx-nine.
 |
| Tabular array with Pink Tablecloth, 1964, Richard Artschwager. |
 |
| Exit, Don't Fight City Hall, Richard Artschwager |
 |
| George W. Bush, Artschwager's Celotex President. |
Source: https://art-now-and-then.blogspot.com/2016/07/richard-artschwager.html