complex and structural as any good painter’s.” (Donald Judd, “In the Gallery,” Arts Magazine, March 1962) Chamberlain’s use of color was never meant to allude to or reference the automobile materials that comprised his sculpture; his interest lay in the active transformation of everyday materials and the diverse ways in which he could force the materials into twisted and contorted arrangements divorced from their stylish automotive origins. Chamberlain recalled watching someone squeeze a sponge in their hand while washing dishes, when one end of the sponge popped out of one side of his fst it looked like a sculpture to the artist. “Its daily life,” he explained, “That’s where I get the idea that everybody makes sculpture every day, whether in the way they throw the towel over the rack or the way they wad up the toilet paper. That’s all very personal and very exact, and in some sense very skillful on their part…those little things, like blowing up a paper bag and hitting it so it pops —take it one little step further and do it in slow motion and explore what the resistance of
the air in the bag is, and you make something. To me that is very interesting, if there is a body of work demonstrating all these things that come together, that’s useful in art history, as a record of accumulation and development of knowledge in this occupation.” (John Chamberlain, quoted in Julie Sylvester, John Chamberlain, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculpture 1954-1985, New York, 1986, p. 12) The everyday compression of physical matter and the human manipulation of discarded bits of metal associated with speed and movement inform Chamberlin’s innovative sculptural practice. Accessing the traditions of Futurist and Pop art, he reconfgures the very distinctions between painting and sculpture. Untitled relishes a range of pulsating blues and energetic angular bends that bare traces of the violent impact the sculpture has endured. For Chamberlain, each sculpture represents an endless possibility of forceful, creative exertion over found materials coated in the most vibrant of hues.
Willem de Kooning, A Tree in Naples, 1960. Oil on canvas, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY © 2017 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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