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Richard Artschwager
12/10/2019

Richard Artschwager

RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER

Mart Rovereto, 12 October 2019 — 2 February 2020

Curated by Germano Celant
Exhibition co-organized by Mart and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Mart presents the first complete exhibition ever organized in Italy dedicated to Richard Artschwager. This major international project is entrusted to the curator Germano Celant in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.
Seeking to grasp space, everyday objects, and perception, Artschwager’s art represents an unicum in 20th-century art. The
survey exhibition highlights the seminal nuclei of the artist's quest, featuring works from the early 1960s to the first decade of the new millennium.

Richard Artschwager. The international project

This long awaited Richard Artschwager Exhibition is opening on 12th October at Rovereto’s Mart. The exhibition is the outcome of an extraordinary partnership with Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which was, in many respects, Mart’s model at the time of its founding.

Both set up in post-industrial contexts reworked in accordance with a cultural drive based on a late millennium urban renewal and designed by two archistars - Canadian Frank O. Gehry and Ticino architect Mario Botta – and famous for their 20th century art collections and great temporary exhibitions, the two museums drew up a partnership agreement and presented a joint research project curated by Germano Celant. Opening in Italy, from 12th October to 2nd February, the exhibition will then move in to the Basque Country where it will exhibit from 28th February to 10th May.

This Celant curated retrospective is an opportunity for an extraordinary journey through the work of an artist who rethought art’s object and operational field.

Rovereto will be presenting Artschwager’s main masterpieces thanks to generous loans from some of the world’s largest collections such as Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Broad Art Foundation (Los Angeles), Tate (London), Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (Paris), Fondazione Prada (Milan), Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation (Basel), Museum Ludwig (Cologne) and contributions by some of the world’s most prestigious galleries: Gagosian (New York), Georg Kargl (Vienna), David Nolan (New York), Xavier Hufkens (Brussels), Sprüth Magers (Berlin) and Galleria Artiaco (Naples).

This exhibition on Richard Artschwager accords with the lines of enquiry preferred by Mart over recent years. In particular research on those artists - such as Giuseppe Penone, Robert Morris and Francesco Lo Savio – who revolutionised the way art work was conceived and the relationship between space and time in its creation from the 1960s onwards will flow directly ideally into the exhibition. This exhibition project also renews its dialogue with Fortunato Depero’s applied art experiences.

Richard Artschwager. The exhibition

With around 80 art works from the early 1960s to the first decade of the new millennium and designed by Celant as an open maze, the exhibition highlights the key mainstays of Artschwager’s work: from structures in wood and formica to paintings on celotex, from sculptures in nylon silk to the ‘corner pieces’ without forgetting the small horsehair and blp and environmental work produced by the artist from 1968 onwards.

Over a long and composite career Artschwager constructed a unique 20th century art trajectory with his sculptures and paintings, an equilibrium between craftsmanship and industrialisation whose end was an understanding of space, everyday objects and the people who live with them.

Mart’s exhibition layout offers a rich and complex portrait of Richard Artschwager’s work which constantly questions objects’ superficial appearance and essence, our expectations of experience and reality. Germano Celant wrote on this subject in the exhibition catalogue: “It was on this ambivalence between reality and appearance

that the artist developed his visual discourse on the necessity of challenging the iconographic dogmatism of tendencies (like Pop Art and Minimal Art) that claimed to be antithetical and in opposing camps, while the multiplicity of their relations and associations was part of the open language of art. Since no single mental and visual order existed, Artschwager avoided conicts and practiced a synthesis that included all the elements, however dierent, and held them together. To achieve this he worked on their tension which, as it did not have to respond to specic requests and requirements, remained in tune with an evolutionary conception of communication: that of the ambiguous and shifting dynamics of the media that waver in a continuum, molded by the ow of perpetually variable information. Thus his position was a rejection of rigidity and stiening, sclerosis and inexibility, rupture and opposition. He worked on the transversal nature of the object which allowed him to keep alive the uidity of his materials that were always interwoven with the images”. And again: “A ow between the parts that Artschwager took up, so that the object, was presented as astonishing change, where the banal was mixed with the artistic. In this way he avoided the conceptual monotony of Minimal Art and the organized frivolity of Pop Art, in order to prompt a return to the experience of the thing, entrusted to the viewer, who was invited to reect on the duality of seeing and touching that regards the idea or the reality of the chair: “Made ... the chair as idea, as simple, all-compassing notion, not the most ideal chair necessarily, which would depend on who’s going to be sitting in it—their build and predilections”.

Artschwager thus takes on the representation of places, scenes of everyday life and commonly used objects such as tables, chairs, chests of drawers, seen through the use of new industrial materials such as formica, celotex, acrylic paint and horsehair.

In both his painting and sculpture, an anonymous sheet of walnut coloured formica is both itself and a representation of a plank of wood, tables and chairs are simultaneously furniture, sculpture and image and paintings and sculptures can be both multi-image and three dimensional still life.

Celant explains that the artist was “aware of the concept of weight and bulk, of material, natural and industrial, of the notion of space and environment, avoiding any theorization, so that his “running” is possible only in synthetic and empathic unity with the places of everyday life, turned into art”.

Artschwager placed the structure of perception centre stage, enquiring into the world of images, objects and space occupied by human beings. His work is visually bound up with everyday life, made of wood and formica and sometimes decorated with different or painted material in order to evoke estrangement between the known object and its abstraction.

This is supplemented, in the sculpture in particular, by attention to pure geometric form leading to abstraction and a use of solid figures accompanied by a sense of painterly illusionism.

The work explores space reflecting on the optical potential of objects and materials in two dimensional furniture hung up on walls or the use of architectural angles as the fulcrum of sculptural composition. In painting, too, Artschwager pursued illusionism, decorating frames with black and white patterns which cut across compositions and, at the same time, disorient onlookers. This ambiguity is a full blown exploration of the tensions and contradictions inherent in defining objects and family experiences.

Artschwager’s work constantly questions appearance and essence with an ironically intelligent take on ontology, epistemiology and aesthetics.

His is a delicate and realistic reading of the world, both humorous and monumental.

On the occasion of the exhibition, Mart will be printing an important publication retracing Richard Artschwager’s life and recounting the most significant international events which acted as backdrop to his life.

Published by Silvana Editoriale, the volume comprises a substantial essay by curator Germano Celant and a large chronological of over 200 reproductions of his work, photographs and archive documents. Texts by the artist will also be included.

Richard Artschwager. The artist

Richard Artschwager was born in 1923 in Washington, DC and died in 2013 in Albany, New York. After graduating from New York’s Cornell University in 1948, he studied at the school founded in New York by Amédée Ozenfant, one of the pioneers of abstraction. In the early 1950s Artschwager focused on furniture making, producing straightforward furniture objects. After a disastrous fire in his workshop in the late 1950s he began making sculptures using industrial materials and continued with painting and design, including site-specific work.

Artschwager’s first exhibition was held at New York’s Art Directions Gallery in 1959 and this was followed by the first of many solo exhibitions with Leo Castelli in 1965. His solo exhibitions included: Up and Across, Neues Museum, Nuremberg, Germany (2001); Museum für angewandte Kunst (MAK), Vienna (2002); Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2003); Painting Then and Now, Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami (2003); Up and Down/Back and Forth, Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin (2003); Richard Artschwager!, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

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