New York
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Freestanding sculptures and wall pieces by John Chamberlain filled the Guggenheim Museum’s four floors last spring, offering viewers a posthumous survey of the artist’s crumpled steel and crushed metal sculptures from the past 40 years. His unique approach to sculpture began in 1957, when he took material from an antique car belonging to Larry Rivers and drove over it, as he told Julie Sylvester in a 1991 interview published in a Pace Gallery catalogue. Chamberlain then began selecting pieces from junkyards and body shops and subjecting them to a variety of tools, including a slicer, a steel-cutting chisel, and an acetylene torch. Credited with translating Abstract Expressionism into three dimensions, Chamberlain was often discussed in relation to de Kooning, his sculptural process compared to gestural painting. The originality of Chamberlain’s use of color, however, is demonstrated by a black, brown, and chrome pedestal sculpture made in 1963 and later titled Marilyn. A pastel-colored companion piece, Miss Lucy Pink, looks forward in its construction to later, denser constructions. …see the entire review in the print version of January/February’s Sculpture magazine.
