Richard Artschwager

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Richard Artschwager in Rotterdam

Richard Artschwager (born December 26, 1923 in Washington, DC , † February 9, 2013 in Albany, New York ) was an American object artist, painter, graphic artist and sculptor. He was one of the most important representatives of Minimal Art .

Career

Artschwager was born in 1923 to a German father and a Russian mother. From 1941 to 1948 he studied mathematics and chemistry at Cornell University , Ithaca , in the state of New York (USA). From 1942 to 1946 he did his military service in the US Army in Europe. As an intelligence officer, he was involved in the liberation of the almost completely destroyed city of Kassel in 1944/45 . From 1950 to 1952 Artschwager studied at the Amedée Ozenfant Studio School in New York . He then earned his living making furniture and in 1963 a. a. Claes Oldenburg's Bedroom Ensemble (now in the Museum of Modern Art , Frankfurt am Main ). In 1962, Artschwager increasingly turned to his own art production, which refused to be clearly assigned and which deliberately undermined the genre of his works. He developed his sculptural works, which are associated with Minimal Art , and his painting , which is reminiscent of hyperrealism , almost in parallel.

plant

Artschwager has been designing his own furniture-like structures since 1962, the sculptural autonomy of which, however, always remains clearly recognizable at second glance. He developed cubic forms step by step over many drawings . He veneered a simple cube shape with different colored Formica or wood imitations, square surfaces and several triangles indicate imaginary functions. "... the object could in principle be used as a table (even if you didn't know where to put your legs), at the same time it was like a picture of a table in the reduction of its shape and the scheme of colors".

An early sculptural work from 1962 already combined the artist's sculptural and painterly approaches: Portrait I from 1962. On a cube he made is a portrait of a man painted in grisaille tones, reminiscent of a black and white photograph.

He painted the pictures he had created since the mid-1960s on Celotex , a solid fibreboard made from sugar cane waste with mineral fibers , the back of which he used as a painting surface . He initially took his motifs from real estate advertisements in newspapers. Later other banal motifs were added, two also with pornographic content. Artschwager enlarged the found motifs many times over and transferred them to the rough surface of the hardboard. With his oil painting , executed in grisaille technique , he gave the impression of an enlarged and rasterized photograph. This approach, which is close to American hyper-realism, ignored any subjectivity. "It is the material and its structure that should determine the work, not the handwriting of the artist." ( Kasper König )

Works by Richard Artschwager were represented at the 4th documenta , documenta 5 , documenta 7 , documenta 8 and documenta 9 in Kassel between 1968 and 1992 . Artschwager belonged to the artist line of Rolf Ricke , the pioneering gallery owner for Minimal Art in Europe. He lived and worked in upstate New York .

Quote

“Sculpture is tangible, painting is easy to see. I wanted to make a sculpture for the eye and a painting to touch ”.

Awards

Exhibitions

Works in public collections (selection)

literature

  • Robert Darmstädter: Reclam's artist lexicon . Philipp Reclam jun., Stuttgart 1979, ISBN 3-15-010281-2 .
  • Richard Armstrong: Richard Artschwager, Exhibition Catalog of the Whitney Museum of American Art . New York 1988, ISBN 0-87427-057-X .

Web links

Commons : Richard Artschwager  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Richard Artschwager, Whose Multifarious Work Defied Categorization, Dies at 89
  2. ↑ http://www.roswithahaftmann-foundation.com/de/preistraeger/2007_laudatio_ra.htm Kasper König
  3. ↑ Members: Richard Artschwager. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed February 13, 2019 .
  4. ↑ nationalacademy.org: Past Academicians "A" ( Memento of the original from November 9, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed on June 13, 2015) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.nationalacademy.org
personal data
SURNAME Artschwager, Richard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American artist
DATE OF BIRTH December 26, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Washington, DC , United States
DATE OF DEATH February 9, 2013
Place of death Albany (New York)