Displaying items by tag: richard artschwager

When the Whitney Museum of American Art opens its new building in Manhattan’s meatpacking district on May 1, it’s the big things everyone will notice first: the sweeping views west to the Hudson River; the romantic silhouettes of Manhattan’s wooden water towers; the four outdoor terraces for presenting sculptures, performances and movie screenings; and the tiered profile of its steel-paneled facade, intentionally reminiscent of the Whitney’s Modernist, granite-clad Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue, which had been the museum’s home since 1966.

Its new digs, designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano, also offer commodious interior spaces: 50,000 square feet of galleries, unencumbered by structural columns, and huge elevators that are themselves immersive environments, the work of the artist Richard Artschwager.

There is an air of frenetic activity in and around the glassy headquarters of Paris’s Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art. Heavy trucks are delivering strange and hefty packages to the door. Inside the gallery, a giant black question mark is suspended in the air, next to a sleek aircraft that looks like it has made a day trip from the next century. Why are we here, the first work seems to ask? Whatever, I can get us out super-quickly, replies the second. Existential questions get short shrift in the hyper-velocity of today’s contemporary art scene.

The atmosphere is frisky: a birthday is being celebrated. It was 30 years ago that the foundation opened its doors to the public for the first time. It was immediately, and notably, successful. The popular appeal of contemporary art may be a cliché of today’s cultural landscape but it was not so straightforward in 1984. “It was a very different world,” says Alain Dominique Perrin, then-president of the renowned jeweller Cartier International, who masterminded the project.

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England will partner with the Hall Art Foundation to present a series of exhibitions of contemporary and post-war art drawn from the collections of the Hall Art Foundation and Andrew and Christine Hall. Together, the Foundation’s collection and that of the Halls includes some 5,000 works by Richard Artschwager, George Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Eric Fischl, Anselm Kiefer, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol and many other important contemporary art figures.

The collaboration will kick off on October 8, 2013 with an exhibition of works by leading British-born artist, Malcolm Morley. Malcolm Morley at the Ashmolean: Paintings and Drawings from the Hall Collection will present 30 works dating from 1964 to the present. Morley, who often paints colorful scenes of man-made disasters, is considered one of the founders of hyperrealism, a genre of painting resembling a high-resolution photograph. Malcolm Morley at the Ashmolean will be on view through March 30, 2014.

The partnership between the Hall Art Foundation and the Ashmolean Museum is expected to develop into a long-term relationship and will eventually include a new contemporary art gallery at the institution.

Genre-defying painter, sculptor, and illustrator, Richard Artschwager (1923-2013), died February 9, 2013 in Albany, NY. He was 89.

Artschwager, who was often linked to the Pop Art movement, Conceptual Art, and Minimalism, resisted classification through his clever genre mixing. His most well known sculpture, Table with Pink Tablecloth (1964) is an amalgamation of Pop Art and Minimalism and consists of a box finished in colored Formica, creating the illusion of a wooden table draped in a pink tablecloth. Artschwager often used household forms in his work including chairs, tables, and doors. In his paintings, Artschwager often painted black and white copies of found photographs and then outfitted them with outlandish frames made of painted wood, Formica or polished metal.

Artschwager was born in 1926 in Washington, D.C. and went on to study at Cornell University. In 1944, before he could finish his degree, he was drafted into the Army and sent to Europe. Upon returning to the United States after World War II, Artschwager completed his degree and decided to pursue a career in art. He moved to New York City and began taking classes at the Studio School of the painter Amédée Ozenfant, one of the founders of Purism. With a growing family and bills to pay, Artschwager took a break from making art to start a furniture-making business. After a fire destroyed his workshop, Artschwager returned to making art, developed his defining style, and was taken on by the Leo Castelli Gallery, which represented him for 30 years.

A few days prior to Artschwager’s death, the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan closed a major career retrospective of his work. It was the second of its kind to be organized by the museum.