Galerie Karsten Greve is showcasing Sculpture, a brand-new exhibition of works by American artist John Chamberlain. The chosen works span 40 years of his artistic output and date from 1967 to 2007. As a result, the programme carries on the long-standing creative collaboration between John Chamberlain and Karsten Greve that started at the beginning of the 1970s.
John Chamberlain, one of the greatest painters of the 20th century, was a master of metal folding and metamorphosis in addition to being a talented colorist. In order to free themselves from outmoded dogmas, the post-World War II ethos spurred artists to investigate and seek for new freedoms. The abstract expressionist movement first appeared in New York during the interwar period and peaked after the Victory of 1945. Through a creative engagement, John Chamberlain supported the school of thought that claimed plastic language was independent of gesture.
John Chamberlain chose his material right away: steel, which he frequently hand-selected from abandoned cars. He would continue to alter it. “Arena in which to act” is how Jackson Pollock described the evolution of the medium. Because of their symbiotic relationship with form, gesture, and color, Chamberlain’s sculptures have been compared to Willem de Kooning’s paintings as the antithesis of each other. In a way, Chamberlain was able to transform this novel photographic emotion into a sculptural form.
The idea of assemblage, which is present in both John Chamberlain’s metalworking and his artistic activities, is central to his work. The 1976 View from the Cockpit series of works on paper, which pays homage to Robert Delaunay’s orphism, shines with the intensity and purity of the colors shown in a visual completeness. Since the middle of the 1980s, he has only occasionally shown monotypes, which demonstrate yet another distinctive technique and may be regarded as sculpture on a two-dimensional support. He added color through collage and assemblage to these monotypes.
A number of photographs will be included in the sculpture exhibition to complete the picture of the artist’s diverse areas of output. In 1977, John Chamberlain first experimented with a Widelux camera. Because of its unique construction, it was possible to generate distortions by having the lens swivel on a horizontal panorama that would be impossible with traditional cameras. Chamberlain took the photos while swinging the camera, just like in Downtown (1989).
John Chamberlain said in 1984, “I’m still making sculptures in the same way as I made the poetry. At Black Mountain College, where he studied and later taught, he encountered the poets Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, whose teachings had a considerable influence on his writing. Olson claims that a poem’s “form,” or, in other words, its structure and outward look, is significant. According to Chamberlain, who applied this idea to both his poems and the titles he gave them, a poem must have a feeling of proprioception and be focused on bodily experience. For his part, Creeley taught his pupils to view words as separate entities, visual facts with their own particular qualities.
In 1984, theorist Hal Foster wrote that “the space abandoned by the old sculpture’ category” had made way for the new, highlighting the importance given to the medium and space that went beyond the customary dogmas of the discipline. Visitors can therefore experience the many changes in shapes and space that the sculpture exhibition offers.