Richard Artschwager at Anthony Grant and Nolan/Eckman - New York - art exhibition

When it first appeared upon the art scene in the early 1960 Richard Artschwager's work strike one as beinged situated somewhere between Pop and Minimalism. His boxy plastic arts celebrated a reductive geometry while retaining a relation to everyday objects such as chairs, tables and framed pictures. His paintings, linear representations of banal displays combined a Pop-style mockery of pictorial illusion and a Minimalist reliance upon industrial materials (his favored support was Celotex a textur loam created from sugarcane pressed above panels).

In the 1980 the conceptual aspects of his work came to the fore when a younger generation embraced his art as a precursor to their possess interest in appropriation and "simulacra." on a sudden the wood-grain pattern of the Formica cover thinly that sheathed Artschwager's sculptures was not just retro on the other hand spoke of the "post-natural" state of contemporary reality, while the machine-like Celotex paintings were seen as prescient challenges to the myths of authenticity and self-expression.

The work in Anthony Grant's condens view of four decades of Artschwager's work still direct the eyes fresh and provocative. Full of visual paradoxes and formal conundrum the textur paintings and pieces of strange quasi-furniture now strike one as being less about exploding the conventions of modernism than about challenging habits of perception. This display also suggested that Artschwager emerg bonny much full blown: pieces from the 1990 fetch the same kind of thematic affects and visual sleight of hand as those from the 1960 A notable exception is an unusually direct material part of work from 1994 that consists of plywood crates built to refer to the forms of the absent phenomenons that they would enclose--identified in titles as coffins, confessionals and crosse These statuarys have a strangely religious specificity and an unsettling funereal quality.

A agreeing show of Artschwager's recent drawings at Nolan/Eckman pointed to a of recent origin direction. Done in charcoal and displaying occasional besmears these drawings are unabashedly hand-drawn, on the other hand the images are as deadpan as at any time Many appear to be based upon news photos--an aerial view of a train shipwreck for instance, or a multitude scene that the title identifies as a collection of North Koreans. Several drawings not away the contour of a single strange shape, identified variously in titles as a bladder, an arm or a fiery water bottle. These almost abstract images draw attention to the quirky outline of the surrounding negative space. Here, as in Artschwager's earlier work, we are at no time quite sure what we are looking at or flat if we should bother trying to identify the images. Whether working in sum of two units dimensions or three, Artschwager continues to tease us with his expert slippages between the banal and the enigmatic.

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