RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER! FEBRUARY 20 – MAY 11, 2014

CONTENTS

I ‐ RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER!

 PRESS RELEASE 2  RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER'S BIOGRAPHY 4  PROGRAMME FOR THE PUBLIC 5  #BLPMC 6  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 7  ABSOLUTELY ORIGINAL, 8 A TEXT BY JENNIFER GROSS, CURATOR OF THE EXHIBITION

II ‐ NOUVEAU MUSEE NATIONAL DE MONACO

 PRESENTATION AND PROGRAMME 19  ORGANISATION CHART 22  PARTNERS 24  PRACTICAL INFORMATION 25

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I. RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER! PRESS RELEASE

Nouveau Musée National de Monaco-Villa Paloma presents the most comprehensive retrospective to date of Richard Artschwager's (1923–2013) work from February 20 until May 11.

The exhibition is organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in association with the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, and curated by Jennifer Gross, Chief Curator and Deputy Director for curatorial affairs at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, in Lincoln, Massachusetts. The NMNM’s presentation is organized by Director Marie-Claude Beaud. Following the presentation of Richard Artschwager! at Whitney Museum, New York, the exhibition travelled to the , Los Angeles,and the , Munich.

Richard Artschwager! features over 135 works spanning six decades, including sculptures, paintings, drawings, photographs, and prints. Often associated with Pop, , and , his work never fit neatly into any of these categories. His artistic practice consistently explored questions regarding his own visual and physical engagement with the world; his objects straddle the line between illusion and reality. The exhibition reveals the artist’s prescience in his career-long commitment to exploring the profound effect photography and technology have had in transforming our engagement with the world. His work has responded to and challenged how these media—and our experience of things as images rather than as things in themselves—have shifted human experience from being rooted in primary physical experience to a knowledge mediated by secondary sources such as newspapers, television, and the Internet.

Marie-Claude Beaud, Director of NMNM reminds that “In 1994, for the opening of the building created in by Jean Nouvel for Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain of which I was Director, I chose to call on Richard Artschwager to develop the concepts of the “Patron’s Spirit”. In the spirit of a joke, I asked him to “create gold fishes and rocks for an aquarium”, to answer the idea – at first simple – to commission one or several artworks to an artist, according to his desire and inspiration. The poetry in Richard’s work, somewhere between fiction and reality, and the extreme intelligence of his vocabulary met the architect’s, the sponsor’s and my expectations. Presenting this retrospective at NMNM, after the Whitney Museum, the Hammer Museum and Haus der Kunst is therefore a wonderful opportunity for the Museum to show the work of this unique artist and to place Monaco in the circuit of the biggest museum institutions worldwide.”

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

The NMNM presents in the seven exhibition spaces of Villa Paloma, a retrospective that articulates different series, ranging from the first experiments using Formica to the drawings, paintings on industrial materials and furniture pieces. The exhibition, in its last presentation, is the occasion to discover and better understand the work of this major pioneer of contemporary art. For more than fifty years, Richard Artschwager (1923-2013) remained steadily at the forefront of contemporary art. He began making art in the 1950s, had his first one-person exhibition at the age of forty- two at the Gallery in New York in 1965, and made his first appearance in a Whitney Annual in 1966.

As Jennifer Gross notes in her catalogue essay, “The works presented here both defy and affirm our aesthetic expectations, occupying the familiar spaces of sculpture and rehearsing painting’s traditional genres. Yet they hover just out of reach of our physical and visual anticipation of what they should be or reveal to us. Artschwager stated early in his career that he wanted to make ‘useless objects’—art that would halt our absentminded engagement with the

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world around us and insist upon visual and physical encounters in real time and a shared space. The works presented in this exhibition attest to the originality and persistence of his vision.”

Artschwager long used commercial and industrial materials in both his paintings and sculptures. A gifted woodworker who made his living making furniture throughout much of the 1950s, he began to incorporate Formica into his art, calling it “the great ugly material, the horror of the age, which I came to like suddenly . . . it looked as if wood had passed through it, as if the thing only half existed . . . But it’s a picture of something at the same time, it’s an object.” Artschwager became increasingly interested in combining wood and Formica in his art and by the early 1960s he was using these materials to create works that hovered between painting and sculpture and frequently took furniture as a point of departure. He worked with a vocabulary of domestic forms in an attempt to articulate space and our perception of it. Similarly, in 1962 he started to paint on Celotex fiberboard, an inexpensive construction material with a rough surface that gives his painted works the look of something distantly recalled. For decades he examined the relationships between fundamental, everyday objects—including tables, chairs, windows, mirrors, and baskets. He was interested in not only how these objects related to each other visually, but how our perception and understanding of each informed our experience of them.

As curator Jennifer Gross notes, “Artschwager had come to the realization that art lay as much in the seeing as in the making—that it lay in one’s perspective on things, not just in craft. While he would continue to be an object-maker whose attention to detail was ‘fanatical,’ he was determined that his future efforts would be applied to things to be looked at, to what he identified as the ‘useless’ realm of art.”

In conjunction with Richard Artschwager's retrospective, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco presents #BLPMC, a citywide installation of the artist's blps in the Principality. Artschwager first created his blps—a word coined by the artist and pronounced, "blips"—in the late 1960s. This installation consists of black lozenge-shaped marks meant to inspire focused looking and draw our attention to the places and things around us that often go unnoticed.

Sunday March 2, April 6 and May 4 at 3pm, the film Shut up and Look, directed by Maryte Kavaliauska, will be shown in full version in Villa Paloma's video room. It provides an intimate look at the artist as he abandoned a reclusive life style to allow the camera into his private world over the last eight years.

In the frame of the exhibition, Mountain Climber (Incomplete) / Passers By / Confrontations, 1992, by John Baldessari from the UBS Art Collection will be on view in the educational space of Villa Paloma, La Table des Matières.

Curator : Jennifer Gross, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts Scientific coordination of the exhibition in Monaco : Cristiano Raimondi, NMNM Press Contact: Elodie Biancheri, [email protected], +377 98 98 20 95

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RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER'S BIOGRAPHY

For nearly sixty years, Richard Artschwager (1923-2013) created paintings, sculptures and drawings that challenge our perception of eveyday experiences and things by making the familiar unfamiliar. In his early years as an artist, he stated that he wanted to produce “useless objects” – art that would halt our absentminded engagement with the world and insist upon visual and physical encounters in real time and shared space. His indefatigable commitment as a maker of objects has resulted in some of the most conceptually and aesthetically compelling work of the late twentieth century.

Artschwager started to gain recognition as an artist in the early 1960’, a time when Minimalism, Conceptual and were at the forefront of American art. Rather than fitting neatly into these categories, however, his work combines elements of all three. He also blurred categorical distinctions between pictures, sculptures, and functional objects and used photography and commercial materias such as rubberized horse hari, Celotex and Formica – with its stimulated wood grain – to confound our sens of what is real. His exploration of perception extends to his radical “blps” (elongated dots he began making in 1967-68), which are on view throughout the Museum, and make everything around them, as the artist noted, more “see-able”.

The more than one hundred works on view here attest to Artschwager’s remarkable capacity to create seemingly endless variations within a consistent vocabulary of forms and materials. His vision was marked by a sense of curiosity and wonder, which he instilled in his art and inspires in us.

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PROGRAMME FOR THE PUBLIC

The NMNM seeks to encourage meetings between the public, artworks and creators. At Villa Paloma and Villa Sauber, La Table des Matières and Le Salon de Lecture offer visitors of all ages a special setting allowing them to extend their visit and quench their curiosity.

Alongside the thematic visits (upon reservation) and the children’s workshops MASC (during school holidays), the Hors Circuit program offers all year round informal encounters in small groups with artists, architects, historians, curators enabling visitors to see things in new ways and discover new horizons.

HORS CIRCUIT

 Sunday March 2, 4pm Catherine Macchi, Art Historian, will guide the public around the exhibition

 Sunday March 2, April 6, and May 4, 3pm, projection of Shut up and Look a film by Maryte Kavaliauska in Villa Paloma's videoroom. this film offers an intimate look at the artist's life and work.

 Friday March 28, 7.30pm, Disrupt!on, experimental electronic live set by Julien Bayle, audiovisual artist

 Every week-end : activation of IKHÉA©SERVICE N°24 SLOWMO, « Le ralentisseur » (Collection du Centre national des arts plastiques – Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication – France). A Botox[s] network project.

GUIDED TOURS

Mediators are available every week-end at Vlla Paloma to guide the public in its visit or asnwer questions (French and English).

Group visits are possible every day of the week, upon reservation.

Visits for the hearing impaired are available, in the presence of a sign language interpreet, upon reservation.

Visits for the visually impaired are possible upon reservation

Visites for groups of mentally or psychologically impaired people are available upon request

MASC RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER!

During this artist-led worshop, whildren will discover Richard Artschwager's work and will take part in workshops based on the artist's creations (drawings, models, volume, painting). Abril 22 to 25, 2014, every day from 2pm to 5pm , for children between 7 and 12 years old. 40 euros

Information and reservation +377 98 98 49 38 or [email protected]

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#BLPMC FEBRUARY 20 ‐ SEPTEMBER 30 2014

#BLPMC is a project of blps installation in the public space, initiated by the NMNM in collaboration with Monte-Carlo SBM and many other partners.

In conjuction with the exhibition Richard Artschwager! at NMNM-Villa Paloma from February 20 to May 11, 2014, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco presents an installation of the artist’s blp in the Principality. The blp (pronounced "blip") was first created by Artschwager in the late 1960’s. This installation consists in of black lozenged-shaped marks meant to inspire focused looking and draw our attention to the places and things around us that often go unnoticed.

Artschwager’s blps have been installed in numerous public locations in cities in the U.S. and Europe, such as on subways and building façades, as well as indoor locations such as galleries, and produced in a range of materials, including vinyl, spray-painted stencils, wood and rubberized horse hair. The blps have transformed art spaces and city streets for decades, creating an opportunity for the « useless looking » the artist aspried to throughout his career.

Let your eyes roam the city searching for BLPS and share your discoveries from February 20 until September 30, 2014 !

To enter, publish your own photo of a blp with the hashtag #BLPMC in the text or caption on Instagram or Twitter or email it to [email protected]. For more information : www.blpmc.com

On October 1, a prize draw will designate the winner of a one-night stay for two people at Monte-Carlo Bay Hotel & Resort and a treatment at SPA Cinq Mondes offered by Monte-Carlo SBM.

LIST OF THE BLP LOCATIONS

MONTE-CARLO SBM CHANTIER “La Petite Afrique” Casino de Monte-Carlo CONSEIL NATIONAL Hôtel de Paris Monte-Carlo GARE SNCF MONACO MONTE-CARLO Hôtel Hermitage Monte-Carlo LE MERIDIEN BEACH PLAZA Monte-Carlo Bay Hotel & Resort MUSEE OCENAOGRAPHIQUE DE MONACO Monte-Carlo Beach NOVOTEL MONTE-CARLO Thermes Marins Monte-Carlo OFFICE DU TOURISME Sporting Monte-Carlo « Salle des Etoiles » UBS S.A. Buddha-Bar Monte-Carlo Café de Paris La Rascasse

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THE EXHIBITION IS ORGANIZED BY THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE YALE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY, NEW HAVEN

CURATOR : Jennifer Gross, DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, Massachussetts SCIENTIFIC COORDINATION OF THE EXHIBITION IN MONACO : Cristiano Raimondi, NMNM, Monaco

DIRECTOR OF NMNM : Marie Claude Beaud

WE SINCERELY THANK

Ann Artschwager

Adam D. Weinberg, Alice Pratt Brown Director, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Ann Philbin, Director, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles Okwui Enwezor, Director, Haus der Kunst, Munich

Institutional and private lenders and , New York

Credits : All works are by Richard Artschwager, unless otherwise specified

FOR #BLPMC

Monte-Carlo SBM

Conseil National de Monaco, Direction du Tourisme et des Congrès, FPMC, Gares et Connexions (SNCF), Méridien Beach Plaza, Musée Océanographique de Monaco, Novotel Monte-Carlo et UBS S.A.

PARTNERS

Centre de Presse Direction des Affaires Culturelles Direction du Tourisme et des Congrès

MAIN PARTNER

UBS SA

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ABSOLUTELY ORIGINAL A TEXT BY JENNIFER GROSS, CURATOR OF THE EXHIBITION EXTRACT FORM THE PUBLICATION RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER! BY JENNIFER R. GROSS (NEW YORK: WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, 2012)

To find our way toward seeing the world from the perspective of Richard Artschwager, we might start by making an imaginative journey away from his work and toward the places from which this enigmatic artist first learned to look at things. Such an ex-cur-sion would help us to remember that the playing field of culture is grounded not only in the landscape of galleries and museums but also in a visual context much more commonplace and out in plain sight—that everything of interest is, as Artschwager has said, “all right there.”1

This exercise is a rather simple endeavor, not metaphysical but rooted in physical knowledge—knowledge of the mesas outside Las Cruces, New Mexico, where the artist grew up. Looking out toward the unbounded horizon in that topography, we are conscious that each of us is but a small mark or molecule in the universe. This expansive framework, and its shifts in scale determined by context and perspective, left a permanent impression on Artschwager, establishing his sense of how his art lives in the world. As he sees it, both art and life, like cacti that shimmer in and out of focus on the desert horizon, exist through our visual affirmation.

This maximal view of the world is counterbalanced by the disciplined training in close looking administered by both of Artschwager’s parents. His mother, Eugenia, a painter, taught him to draw and to “focus on the edges.”2 His father, Ernst, was a scientist who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the anatomy of the potato,3 studying the microscopic mutation of material as fact. He was also an amateur photographer. Artschwager, by his own account, grew up focused on the structural underpinnings of all organic and inorganic phenomena. He learned at an early age to know and value his world one image after another, from snapshot to camera pan, a habit he has come to believe is integral to his capacity to recognize art when he sees it: I was taught to look under stones, in dusty corners, at what is directly in front of me—that’s the hard part. What is art? Coming from my background, je-ne-sais-quoi is not very much evidence.... I’m lost to meta-physics...I don’t know much about art but I’ll know an art if I see one. I’m thinking like Archie Bunker here....So I try...casting a wide net, salvaging any object, image or event that captures my attention.4 Artschwager’s voracious commitment to looking as a means of valuing the world is what has motivated his practice as an artist for over half a century. His sculptures, paintings, and drawings are evidence of his expedition into the unpredictable waters of aesthetics, applying the skills he learned as a biology student at .5 The result is an oeuvre that is confrontational and confounding, whimsical and exquisite. It started in the late 1950s with paintings of the New Mexico landscape and has come full circle in recent drawings that embrace the same panoramic horizons. This time, however, as Artschwager has reached the age of eighty-eight, his purview is a window not onto the world but beyond it. His art is now illuminated with color and firmly sourced in his imagination, and in the pleasure of exercising the innate capacities as a maker that he has honed over a lifetime. He has fulfilled his stated artistic ambition in life, “to be original.”6

Besides Artschwager’s unrelenting capacity to surprise us, what stands out about his career as we look at it retrospectively is that he has maintained his unique position as an outsider, prophetically anticipating how his culture would see things a few years or decades in the future. His grisaille paintings on Celotex, while their sources in media imagery once made them seem detached, today appear hauntingly nostalgic and beautiful. The hard-edged forms of his sculptures from the 1960s, with their wood-grain-evoking Formica surfaces indexing photography, presaged twenty-first-century eyes all stoked up on technology and fast looking. When they first appeared, they were often perceived as obdurate and unfamiliar; today they seem to assert a genuine human pathos, coming into focus just on the near side of the shimmering disconnect between our lives in real time and our visual, emotional, and intellectual

PRESS KIT - RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER ! 8 investment in the unrelenting tide of images delivered to us by the Internet, images that have become, for many of us, our primary connection to the world. Addressing this slippage between what is real and physical and our expectation, determined by media culture, of something more real is what Artschwager, in his 1990 essay “Art and Reason,”7 described as the disengagement between our social and our physical experience of space, and has been at the heart of all his artistic endeavors.

If you ask Artschwager about his work, he will time and again refer you to “Art and Reason.” The essay shows that this seeming outsider practitioner has been working into the box of art history all along—if from the outside, the real world. In a 2002 interview, when asked whether he felt vision in our culture had funda-mentally changed, he replied with a reference to this essay: Yes, but I’m not talking about the apparatus, I’m talking about our being in a primarily social, as opposed to primarily physical, space. Our physical space has been eroded to the point of being endangered, it survives where there are few people and lots of space and where a person or persons can reside in pleasurable solipsism—watching, listening, not editing or throwing anything away....Social space is language-bound and language is always subject-predicate, a Procrustean abridgment of the Event which, for instance, allows no excluded middle....Just think back to that time when people lived in the country. One didn’t look at red and green lights—in other words, particles—in order to cross the street but rather at the full field of vision. And so it is with Matisse. When you sweep your eyes over it, you’re seeing it as it was intended to be seen. It’s so simple.8 The career trajectory of this late bloomer is well rehearsed in the literature.9 Art-schwager’s life reads like a great American novel, a John Steinbeck epic from the first half of the twentieth century, in which, however, the “aw shucks” protagonist rides off over the horizon of the twenty-first looking less like an everyman and more like an enigmatic, sharp-eyed character invented by Cormac McCarthy. Around the age of forty, almost twenty years after he served in World War II and was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge, Artschwager had an epiphany that making good objects, functional furniture-the craftsman’s profession by which he had kept his family fed and his mind and hands ably occupied—was not the same as making good in his head. Since the production of useful furniture had become a boring reality, he began to push the envelope of taste and tradition as he knew it. Speaking of his motivations in the studio while making this transition, Artschwager has stated, “I had learned that by then—things that are unthinkable, check ’em out. That’s the chief way for finding originality if originality is the target.”10

In 1960, Artschwager sent off a few letters and slides to a handful of art dealers who hung a shingle in New York at the time. Unconnected and middle-aged, he achieved a success that would be the dream of every young artist when , who was working for Leo Castelli, immediately wrote back proposing to include him in a group exhibition. The ingenue artisan-turned-artist became an international sensation in less than three easy steps. Artschwager would stay with Castelli for the next twenty-five years.

What is compelling about this chronology to an art historian is not its reality as a career fantasy but the fact that it threw Artschwager, the mature craftsman, into a hothouse of young scene-makers such as Lee Bontecou, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Marisol, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and , and this in the formative years of the contemporary art market. These were legendary years at the Castelli Gallery, and Artschwager bubbled along, making and exhibiting idiosyncratic work that seemed to adapt like a chameleon to every current art dialogue without ever submitting to any particular school of thought.11

Artschwager’s presence in the art world blurred all the set categories. His pictures and objects sobered up Pop, lightened up Minimalism, and made Conceptual art something other than just a thinking man’s game. How could someone remain so methodically committed to the formal values of sculpture and painting during three decades when they were considered déclassé, yet also keep his insouciant finger so firmly on the pulse of an art culture that was being thoroughly upended by media culture? He has maintained this in-advance and slightly out-of-sync position in the art

PRESS KIT - RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER ! 9 world ever since.

Artschwager’s paintings and sculptures were motivated by questions raised in his own head both about art and about living in the present, about the moments and values reflected in the newspaper he read at the kitchen table each morning. In time, his work would come to examine that kitchen table, the chair he sat on, and the plate off of which he ate. For Artschwager, this subjective axis was where art just might appear, its issues addressed by what he could make with his own hands and reckon with his own eyes. As for the viewer’s engagement with this process, Artschwager made clear in his studio notebook that he was not indifferent to the broader impact of his observations: “The art is what happens to the spectator by prior arrangement of the artist.”12 If you follow his thinking from work to work over the years, it is uncanny how many times, and on how many levels, his decisions touched the broader art dialogue while the journey remained clearly his own.

An anecdote Artschwager tells about how, at the age of forty, with a young family to support, he found the license to commit his life to making what he calls “useless objects”13 could come from a playbook coauthored by Timothy Leary and Marshall McLuhan: he was inspired by watching a children’s cartoon show on television, a chance encounter that determined his life’s work. There was a television program that gave me whispered instructions. It was a children’s morning program of animated cartoons, moderated by a policeman. He told about his son who would spend his time in the garden, nailing boards together. Any kind of boards, just nailed together. Because of this inscrutable anti-social behavior the father, in anger and in sorrow, decided not to send his son to summer camp. Well, it happens I had a lot of scrap of 1/4-inch plywood. What came out was a nailed stack of plywood about the size of a human figure, weighing about 400 pounds, hung from the ceiling by a chain. This was one of the private works whose making filled up my spare time.14 That nailed stack of plywood was Portrait Zero, made around 1961 and still standing as one of Artschwager’s most concisely brilliant reductions of his lifelong formal painterly and sculptural concerns. This is a sculptural image of painting, a composite of image surrogates that occupy the realm of neither painting nor sculpture but hang in midair like an aesthetic piñata begging the recognition and misapprehension of Clement Greenberg. This is Artschwager’s first work to introduce the picture plane into the physical space occupied by sculpture. It is supreme, as in Suprematist, as in wouldn’t Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzky, and be envious of its economy and direct assertion of an ideal of an art constructed of common means? But if we heed Artschwager’s narrative, it is art completely inspired by television as a source of fictional truths. The voice in his living room became the id in his head, a rousing alternative to the voices of art world harpies such as curators, critics, art historians, or even other artists. The medium that in the 1960s would change America by exposing covert social and political agendas had confirmed Artschwager’s thoughts about subject matter, form, and the importance of making art as a mode of cultural claim-staking, as though he were on special assignment for Mr. Rogers.

Road to Damascus (1960), made around the same time as Portrait Zero, is one of Artschwager’s first mature drawings. It presents a man who appears to be seated with his arms under a table so broad that it fills the sheet of paper end to end, its edge reading as a horizon. Pinioned behind the table, the man looks as though he were under interrogation. Even more startling than the positioning of this figure is the fact that the artist has erased his eyes out of their sockets and off the page. The erasures read both as voids and as signs of force, as though his eyes had been blown away. The work’s title evokes the biblical story of the alpha apostle Paul, confronted by a vision of Christ on his way to Damascus. This persecutor of Christians was temporarily blinded by the encounter and experienced a complete change in his perspective on the world and in his sense of his life’s calling. While remaining a religious zealot, Paul became a follower of Christ rather than his foremost denouncer.

PRESS KIT - RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER ! 10 It is intriguing that Artschwager, who is not religious, should have attached a narrative of radical spiritual conversion to this early work. He appears to be referring to his own epiphany, the moment in which he became blind to the finely crafted furniture he was making and the truer vision it led him to in his work. Artschwager had come to the realization that art lay as much in the seeing as in the making—that it lay in one’s perspective on things, not just in craft. While he would continue to be an object-maker whose attention to detail was “fanatical,”15 he was determined that his future efforts would be applied to things to be looked at, to what he identified as the “useless” realm of art.

The image in Road to Damascus of a solitary, limbless figure pinned down by a boundless horizon also exemplifies the intimidatingly honest and empathetic tenor that would underlie Artschwager’s artistic practice from that moment on. While scientific in his formal inquiries, Artschwager has never given up a primarily humanistic approach to making art. Although he has fiercely fought to keep out inflections of the personal “I”—shunned in the wake of , which was thought to have overdone them—his work has always been excruciatingly human, an accounting of the sobering isolation inherent in the individual’s confrontation with the world. Like the stoic work No (1961) by his peer Jasper Johns, to whom he has admitted a debt,16 Artschwager’s art harbors the universal vulnerabilities and banal realities of the human journey.

Formally speaking, Artschwager became a systematic plodder, working like a scientist, moving from one artwork to the next by asking basic questions about what he was seeing. His early painting Baby (1962) shows how direct this process could be at times. The subject of the work is a clichéd image of a sweetfaced infant. When Artschwager first moved to New York, in 1949, he had supported himself with a range of odd jobs, including an extended term as a baby photographer for the Stork Diaper Service. He exhumed the experience through this painting, stepping away from the camera and disposing of the disconnection between experience, process, and result that is inherent to its use. At the same time, he also addressed the unrecognized artist’s problem of how to make his art noticed: Baby wittily capitalizes on the art world adage that it is always dangerous to let a baby into an exhibition opening, since no one will look at the show. More seriously, Artschwager made his picture an image of something we are already drawn to, something we want to see. We look at the painting because its desirable subject draws us toward it. Over the next two decades the artist would apply this logic to every historical painting genre, to religious subjects, history, still life, landscape, and abstraction, pri-marily appropriating compelling images such as architectural icons, disasters, consumer goods, and media personalities from popular sources such as magazines, news-papers, and television.

Artschwager consistently reinforced a pattern of intimate looking by making his paintings on the textured surface of Celotex, the commercial ceiling-tile material that would determine his signature painting style.17 This choice of support achieved the ambition, common among artists working in the early 1960s, to exclude gestural expression from their work, since the board’s textured surface perpetually interrupted and diffused his mark-making. It is one of the idiosyncrasies of his paintings that their images are harder to make out up close than from a distance. Artschwager does not use projection to create these works but grids the source images up old-school style and then replicates the resulting near-abstract segments one by one. As these small marks, and the rough surface of the Celotex, disrupt the cohesiveness of the composition, the image recedes as we approach it, denying us any more clarity about what we are looking at, or about the means by which the picture was composed, than is delivered at first glance.

This lack of control in the viewer’s experience of the paintings has a parallel in the artist’s experience of working on their uneven surfaces, but that is part of Artschwager’s aspiration in using Celotex.18 His most complex compositions—the collapsing facades of the imploding Traymore Hotel in Atlantic City, for example, captured in the “Destruction” series of 1972, and the large-scale interiors of the same period—are particularly stupefying. One is not quite sure how the array and flurry of marks ultimately coalesce into images. That they do, at a distance, is a remarkable artistic feat.

The first Celotex panels Artschwager used were relatively smooth, but over the decades he moved to more disruptively crosshatched and rosette-patterned Celotex boards. More recently he has painted on handmade paper made with

PRESS KIT - RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER ! 11 bagasse (sugarcane fiber), and even on rough, loose-weave fiber panels. These supports diffuse and rupture the images even further, making it almost impossible to reflexively experience a work such as Arizona (2002) as a painting. While teasing our visual expectations, these images primarily assert themselves as objects. Reinforcing this experience, Artschwager has always used the framing of his paintings to emphasize their physical presence in our world. Many of the frames are made of a reflective silver metal that mirrors its viewers and the room around them, asserting the co-extension of these realities. Others are physically bulky, baroquely painted or textured, or mannered in their proportions. Their awkwardness is a reminder that these are images that will not accommodate aesthetic expectations easily.

From the beginning of his career as an artist, Artschwager set out to remove all the narrative and decorative value added to art, draining it of its perfunctory functions as ornamentation and a vehicle for meaning. In this aspiration his paintings of the 1960s bear a strong kinship to Gerhard Richter’s of the same decade. The two artists are acquaintances, and have often been linked as contemporaries who came to painting against a common cultural backdrop.19 They also shared a fascination with the ordinary, or rather with the incomprehensibility, the ungraspable unreality, of the ordinary. These artists’ prodigious oeuvres suggest a like endeavor to normalize the compulsiveness of their desire for visual comprehension and the longing to seize temporal reality. Using photographs as their source material and working without color, they found similar means to reengage painting beyond the conversations around abstraction and Pop art. Their refusal of color confirmed an interest in painting as a surface without the distractions of emotion and representation; gray removed sensation from the pictures, and as Richter wrote, “It evokes neither feelings nor associations; it is really neither visible nor invisible. Its inconspicuousness gives it the capacity to mediate, to make visible, in a positively illusionistic way, like a photograph. It has the capacity that no other color has, to make ‘nothing’ visible.”20

Artschwager’s Seated Group (1962) provides a compelling juxtaposition to Richter’s work of the same decade. As Richter often did, Artschwager drew the image, of a group of people seated around a conference table, directly from a newspaper photograph and rendered it in black, white, and gray. Where Richter would have blurred the image, capturing it more as surface than as representation, Artschwager abstracted his scene from its source photograph by using flat, blocky washes of opaque acrylic to reduce it to its most minimal legibility. Seated Group shows us a sculptor’s eye on painting: it is flat, but irresolutely so, the medium melding with the uneven Celotex on which it lies. In abstracting the image as he did, Artschwager created a kind of antipainting, an image that falls short of delivering the experience of painting. But it also falls short of delivering the experience of sculpture: the table, for example, is necessarily rendered two-dimensionally rather than as a sculptural form, a limitation Artschwager tries to overcome by depicting it as a hovering shape in the foreground, so that it comes close to being experienced as a physical object positioned between the space depicted and the space occupied by the viewer. The artist’s long-term solution to this frustrating limitation of painting as a visual field would eventually be to remove this optical effect from his work: he would perfect a drawing technique whose marks could be read across the surface of the painting but would not coalesce into a pictorial space with a fore- middle-, and distant-ground. His way of making images is akin to the way the ink marks in a newspaper photograph—an ultimately abstract series of dots—coalesce on the surface of the page into a representational whole.

Richter and Artschwager parted ways early on in the questions they brought to painting. Richter was wholly committed to making paintings about painting, his blurring of the photographic representation a by-product of his assertion of a painting’s abstract reality. Artschwager, on the other hand, as a sculptor, made his first move toward reconciling the visceral disconnect between painting and sculpture by making pictorial objects. One was Handle I (1962), an empty frame made of a kind of stair railing, he called “a picture” that “directed the viewer to grab it.”21 Another was Triptych (1962), a work in the form of a portable altarpiece—a beautiful hybrid of virtuosic woodwork inlaid with Formica. Artschwager had found the crux of his life’s work, to make hybrid objects that would blur the realms of painting and sculpture. As he wrote, Sculpture is for the touch, painting is for the eye. I wanted to make a sculpture for the eye

PRESS KIT - RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER ! 12 and a painting for the touch.”22

As Artschwager was making these objects in the pictorial realm, he began to create objects that stood on the floor. He did this by working off his experience as a furniture-maker, wanting to restore to visibility the familiar forms that he had lost the ability to see and appreciate when they were made in wood. He also wanted to pull sculpture back toward the two-dimensional field of vision, to focus on its surface. The solution came like a sign sent from mid-twentieth-century America’s industrial heaven: just as Celotex had provided a neutralizing plane for images to reside on, Formica was a picture of reality that could be used as a sculptural surface. Also like Celotex, this material masked the subjectivity in Artschwager’s process.23 His discovery of it was no less radical for his sculpture than tube paints had been for the work of the field-roaming Impressionists.

Funny and tacky, creepy and alluring, Formica brought photography to bear on sculpture, just as photographs already featured in the Celotex paintings. It could be adapted to the physical contour of any underlying flat, geometric structure, all the while foregrounding the optical experience of representation. It played off the interest in opticality in art that followed in the wake of Pop art’s slick-surfaced images, at the same time that it anticipated questions about art’s physical status and its denial of temporal experience—a subject that would soon become a theoretical focal point in art engendered by English translations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writings on phenomenology, published in 1962.24

In 1963, within the same year and Robert Morris had their commercial-gallery debuts at New York’s Green Gallery and Anne Truitt presented her signature steles at the André Emmerich Gallery, Artschwager was making works such as Portrait II (1963) and Swivel (1964), minimal Formica sculptures whose scale and shape were modeled after domestic furniture and that occupied space in a homely manner. Unlike the minimal geometric forms made by these artists, Artschwager’s work was decidedly anthropocentric, rife with pathos.25 While these sculptures certainly embodied formal considerations, their affable scale and kitsch commercial-grade surfaces wittily winked at the intellectual austerity of their contemporary counterparts in the New York art world. These works were followed by Tower (1964), an upright human-scaled plinth mounted on steps, on both sides, with a window cut through it at eye height. The work invited viewers to step up and directly confront the gaze of the viewer who ascended the stairs on the opposite side. Counter II (1965) similarly invited viewers to become physically engaged by passing through a turnstile—one that humorously resembled a cow’s udder—only to find themselves standing in the space they had already occupied, but did not see as coextensive with their experience of art.26

Discovering in making these sculptures that Formica’s patterns functioned ably as pictorial abstraction, Artschwager embarked on a series of works that capitalized on this trait. In works such as Logus (Blue Logus) (1967) he applied For-mica to the forms of familiar objects—here, a sound amplifier—while in Triptych (With Nude) (Diptych IV) (1966) he juxtaposed the abstraction provided by the material with images painted on Celotex. The cinematic fracturing of the temporal experience of painting evidenced in this work led to further multipanel paintings; Triptych V (1972) and Garden (1973) used the inherent rhythm of the serial format to examine and play out the assertive stasis integral to the object hood of painting.

The “Destruction” series, based on newspaper images of the 1972 demolition by implosion of the Traymore Hotel, an Art Deco architectural icon in Atlantic City, is an extended attempt to transfer the photographic moment into real time through an optical engagement with painting. Artschwager started with a centered, close-up view of the Traymore in a vertical format, seen in Destruction I. Then, in Destruction II, he moved to a more distant, slightly off-center view and a horizontal format, encouraging one’s eye to move across the scene. This was followed by a two-panel depiction featuring a visual stutter in which part of the building is repeated in both panels, creating a sequential rhythm as the building begins to implode. Destruction IV is a single-panel depiction of the implosion in full force. In Destruction V and VI Artschwager returned to the two-panel format, experimenting with crosshatched and rosette-patterned Celotex. This added texture, coupled with the bifurcation of the image, slows the eye’s passage across the panels, creating a physical

PRESS KIT - RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER ! 13 experience of diffused time as the viewer’s eye and mind together endeavor to apprehend the moment. In making the “Destruction” series Artschwager learned that while a two-panel sequence physically affirmed a sense of time, the diffusion of optical experience was more crucial to a temporal experience of painting. He would continue to experiment with this knowledge up until his most recent paintings, which are set on a kind of fiberboard that suspends each stroke of the acrylic medium on the strands of its support.

It was in the year after Artschwager completed the original suite of “Destruction” paintings that Susan Sontag published her groundbreaking book of essays On Photography.27 Sontag’s account of our culture’s addiction to images seemed to explain the immediacy of the media images that Artschwager had been exhuming; she wrote plainly and perceptively of the disengagement between physical and social experience with which Artschwager had already been wrestling for a decade in his art. Sontag described a society malnourished by its ravenous visual consumption, and the alienation that accompanied the cursory knowledge of the world brought on by that aesthetic disorder.28 This kind of remove is a condition of our time, as Walter Benjamin had made clear in his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” first published in English in 1968.29 Photography had enabled a comfortably superficial knowledge of the world, creating the opportunity for an unnaturally homogenous relationship to actual things. And Artschwager had been “quoting” this unfamiliarity with the world in his paintings and sculptures of such things, making real our recognition of them as art.

As Artschwager neared the completion of the first decade of his art-making inquiry, he embarked on a completely new endeavor, the creation of an art form that existed beyond its own object hood. In 1967 he accepted a teaching position at the University of California, Davis. There he developed the conceptual commodity for which he is probably best known, an elongated dot that he named the “blp.” The blp was radical: in and of itself it was completely useless, but by its proximity to other things it made them “see-able.” Artschwager hailed the blp for the new ideal in art it represented. It could not have had a more mundane origination, generated as it was from a childlike drawing exercise: “I was trying to see the minimum number of brushstrokes or lines to make something that is recognizable as a cat. I think I got it down to seven or eight, and, in the process of making these black marks...somehow the black dot traveled, as a thing unto itself, not round but elongated. It turned into a ‘blp,’ and there it was.”30 Years later Artschwager would link this discovery to a method of looking at things peripherally that he had learned from the drawing exercises set for him by his mother: “My mother taught me the elements of drawing. You first draw from the model things that have edges rather than surfaces... That’s how you make the jump from where you can grab something that you imagine or you receive something with all your senses to [put] it on something flat.”31

Artschwager reproduced the blp in a number of sizes and placed it in many public contexts32. The original blps were flat pieces of wood with rounded edges, but in this form, with their edges sharply delineated, they were too discrete as points of focus. The third radical material discovery of Artschwager’s career—rubberized hair—allowed him to push farther the kind of seeing that the blp made possible. He had wanted to diffuse the shape’s edges, and experimented with making it in hair and bristle. Rubberized hair, though, had the added bonus of actualizing the fetishism of seeing that underlay his sensual, obsessive art-making practice. Over the ensuing decades, the blp would migrate from the regular world back into Artschwager’s art. In paintings such as Tintoretto’s “The Rescue of the Body of St. Mark” (1969), it became an abstract signifier of human presence replacing the figures in Tintoretto’s original composition. Two decades later, in Brush Blp (1988), it is an endearingly playful abstract presence.

Artschwager soon returned to New York from California, and while he resumed making paintings and sculptures he would continue to blp-ify the world throughout his career. His discovery of the blp also caused him to consider other forms of punctuating the exhibition space, using sculptural reliefs related to Exclamation Point (1966) and Quotation Marks (1980). In the mid 1970s he gave up his workshop studio space and returned to a concentration on the familiar and rewarding practice of drawing. Now, within his own working notebooks, he discovered the six subjects that would become his imaginative obsession: until 1980, the prin-cipal drawn and printed protagonists in Artschwager’s -pictorial/spatial

PRESS KIT - RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER ! 14 drama would be “Door,” “Window,” “Table,” “Basket,” “Mirror,” and “Rug.” As he described his discovery of these objects that would so occupy him, After the “blps,” I didn’t know where to go next—so I went back into the studio. I leafed through my notebook, in which I had made some sketches, with the idea to work up a study for a painting. I flipped to a drawing of an interior, a room I had once occupied, and made a list of the six objects that were in it. I decided to take this as an instruction to make one drawing, then another, and another, and so on. The instruction endured and I “played” those six objects like I play the piano—I guess you could say that it was some kind of fugal exercise.33 The series unfolded like a scientific experiment with controlled variables. Artschwager would eventually make almost a hundred images (and later, when he resumed having a studio, many objects) on this theme, creating a world of surreal banality through which he thoroughly investigated the boundaries of a room inhabited by familiar things. He reveled in the breadth of perspective facilitated by his extreme familiarity with these subjects using ink, graphite, collage, acrylic, and charcoal and developing a wide range of mark-making techniques, from fingerprinting to squiggling to rubbing in addition to straightforward drawing. The series suggests that it is on the surfaces of things that Artschwager finds the electric, sensual connection he has with the world, and that it is on paper that the taut interface between his observation and his hand is perfectly consummated.

This method of imagining, seeing, and knowing through drawing did not remain on the page, however, but migrated to painting and sculpture, as Artschwager worked to bridge the gap between two- and three-dimensional systems of experience. The kind of schematic drawing on Formica that appears in Table (1977), for example, was applied in 1979 to Bookcase III, a three-dimensional bookcase, with removable Formica books, that has a drawing of a bookcase on its reverse side, shadowing its sculptural actuality with a spare two-dimensional identity. The series achieved a climax of sorts in one of Artschwager’s most eccentric sculptures, Pyramid (Table/Window/Mirror/Door/Rug/Basket) (1979), a three-dimensional pyramidal construction onto which Artschwager collapsed schematic drawings, melding them into a strange hybrid in real space without freeing them from their function as drawn images.

While Artschwager’s obsession with these subjects would subside, their ability to provoke his imagination continued well into the 1980s, as evidenced in such beautiful works as the painting Basket, Mirror, Window, Rug, Table, Door (1985), in which his six characters float gingerly as collaged elements in an austere prisonlike room, torqued into the illusion of three-dimensionality by a perspectival center point set on a disturbingly high horizon line. “Door,” “Window,” “Table,” “Basket,” “Mirror,” and “Rug” would lead to the haunting domestic scenes and objects that have preoccupied Artschwager into the twenty-first century. Where the earlier works feature a kind of visual chicanery, though, the later ones are weighted with the unrelenting drone of mundane living. Hefty tables and chairs, and an unyielding tide of blank table settings, harbor sober reflections on the trauma inherent in boredom and on the somber press of mortality.

The paintings often show ghostly human figures from bird’s-eye perspectives, as in White Table and Thruway (both 1988), while freakish, cloying objects like Double Dinner (1988) and Lunch for Two (2007) embody a universal fear of fixed confrontation. The cast of these works is that of a hazy bad dream, a location from which we observe the uneventful continuum that Marcel Proust called our “improbable everyday lives.”34 For Proust such places were accessible through the temporal order of recollection; for Artschwager and his viewers, they are attained by the manner in which his works pry into our subconscious, their uncanny shifts in scale, and their disturbing subversion of aesthetic reward through material provocation, engendering a visceral anxiety. Rather than redeem the homely and trite, as Walt Whitman and John Frederick Peto did, Artschwager expresses the humble American experience as disappointing, alienating, and harsh.

The forced calm of such observations was interrupted by Artschwager’s crea-tion of a series of objects that updated his early work Portrait Zero, and its multiple picture planes, with a consideration of the invisible influence of time on matter. Journal II (1991) is a relief that hinges in the corner of a room, spreading out on both adjoining walls. Its left side

PRESS KIT - RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER ! 15 is a sweep of rays, painted with a wood-grain pattern in grisaille, that rush into the room’s corner, where they appear to hit with force. There they transform into an assembly of planks, constructed not of wood but of Formica and rendered in color, that splays out on the wall to the right. A literal image of creation as a burst of moving atoms coming into form as matter, or alternately, read right to left, of matter transmuting into energy, the work draws our attention to the fact that the matter we see is only one of its moments in time, only a temporary arrangement of its molecules. The means by which Artschwager chose to engage this imposing concept, usually relegated to the stewardship of physicists and philosophers, is the highly accessible tool of comic innocence. In manifesting the aural resonance of comic book onomatopoeia, with its pows, blams, and splats, the work has a witty, exaggerated literalness, even while it physically embodies the abrupt disconnect between our intellectual and our physical experience of the world.

Journal II inspired a number of shattering, splattering table and chair reliefs, such as Splatter Chair I (1992), which punctuated Artschwager’s installations of this period with visual force. Along with these dramatic pieces, and in keeping with the oversize expectations of the 1980s art market, works such as Organ of Cause and Effect III (1986) and Door II (1992) took on a theatrical scale. If in the 1960s Artschwager’s work had been perceived as kitsch, tasteless, even vulgar, in the 1980s the consumer aspirations of the art world seemed to have caught up with him. His exhibitions with his dealer of these years, Mary Boone, had the aura of stage sets, and the sense of intimate reflection in his work of the previous decade was replaced by a sharp irony. In The Cave (If you lived here, you’d be home now) (1992) and other pieces Artschwager returned to the subject of the glamorous interior, now seen within frames and through mullions stylized with an exaggerated grisaille finish. He also continued to paint domestic interiors, but now they were animated by molten decorative patterning and infusions of color from pieces of Formica inset into the Celotex surface. Works such as Sitting and Not (1992) and Taj Mahal II (1997) explore how imagination helps to bridge the gap between what we know and what we see. The mullions reinforce the viewer’s exclusion from images that emulate the luxury domestic settings familiar in advertising and travel and home-design publications.

In 1981, in the Hayden Gallery at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Artschwager created his first large- scale interactive sculptural installation, Janus III (Elevator), a chrome-and-Formica elevator cab with its own interior lighting. Visitors could enter, press buttons for up or down, and hear an audio track of rushing sound, like that of a moving elevator. He created variations on this work over the next few years, exhibiting them at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1988 and at the Ludwig Museum, Cologne, which acquired the piece in 2002.

In the 1980s and ’90s, Artschwager took his furniture-inspired sculpture out of the museum and gallery context and into the world through a series of outdoor commissions, mediating human scale in built public environments. These austere, functional seating groups, made primarily in granite, were often complemented by live trees and natural settings, which counterbalanced their somber presence with living form. One of the earliest of them was an architectural intervention in the 1987 exhibition Skulptur Projekte, at the Westfälisches Landesmuseum in Münster, Germany. Here, on the ground against the facade of the building, Artschwager placed an untitled work, a planter/bicycle rack, which was experienced as a decorative element that mediated between the structure and the world.

The rise of percent-for-art projects and corporate commissions in the 1980s provided Artschwager with a rapid sequence of public projects through which he explored shifts in scale and the visitor’s experience of place. His best- known public project is Sitting/Stance (1988), a suite of seating groups with lighting elements at Battery Park City in downtown Manhattan. This vein of large-scale sculpture culminated in Generations (1990), at the Elvehjem Museum of Art, Madison, Wisconsin (now known as the Chazen Museum of Art). Artschwager’s design for the plaza in front of the museum integrated the building and its context by incorporating lighting, plantings, and sculptural elements.

In the early 1990s, inspired by an invitation to exhibit at the Portikus exhibition space in , Germany, Artschwager again embarked on a wholly new body of work. The exhibition consisted of fourteen wooden shipping crates—finely crafted crates, but crates nonetheless. This show and subsequent installations of these works looked like

PRESS KIT - RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER ! 16 an exhibition of painting and sculpture that had yet to be unpacked. In some instances the crates operated like blps, installed high on a wall or in a corner, where they animated the visitor’s awareness of the gallery space. These moments of punctuation were counter-balanced by their primacy as real, hermetic, homogenous objects that closed down the expectation of “art” created by the gallery setting. If Formica had functioned for Artschwager as a series of photographic representations of common objects, these crates functioned as embodiments of art’s state of being. As Ingrid Schaffner perceptively wrote in the exhibition’s catalogue, “Conflating creative and collecting impulses, Artschwager’s crates speculate upon past and future conditions of his own art.”35

The fashioning of the crates in wood was in a sense Artschwager’s attempt to retire his sculpture practice before he began to focus on his next large body of paintings, those inspired by Post-Impressionism. He further closed down the inquiry into photographic representation that he had begun with his use of Formica; he now addressed photography straight on, laminating it onto furniture forms in 2000–2.36 And at the same time that he was finalizing his relationship to photography, Artschwager returned to the use of rubberized hair to create a new series of -pictorial/-sculptural hybrids. These shallow figural reliefs —Crouching Man II (2002), for example—created an optical illusion of three-dimensional form, adding to the already extensively blurred boundary between painting and sculpture in his work.

In the late 1980s, Artschwager began to oversee a large studio workshop for the first time since the 1950s. This change in production enabled him to explore issues of replication, and he began to remake a number of his paintings and sculptures, sometimes without adapting them in any significant way, sometimes reenvisioning them as variations on earlier subjects. While he had often in the past made works that were variations on earlier pieces, his projects at this time seem to bookend his career, closing off his work subject by subject, form by form, as though he were confirming to himself that he had not left any question unresolved. One example is the painting Generations III (2003), his reapproach to Baby of 1962. Where the image in Baby is relatively crisp, Generations III shows that over the years Artschwager has steadily and deliberately moved toward an even greater diffusion of his source material. This acute manipulation seems to be his solution to the spatial problem that he outlined in “Art and Reason”: the shift in visualization processes of the last fifty years. He continues to try to lever viewers toward a fresh point of observation from which they might engage with his work. Generations III denies us visual possession of the object and its “information,” disengaging our knowledge reflexes and creating the opportunity for us to use our powers of observation anew. This image of a newborn is on the one hand indistinct and on the other hand startling and raw, and reads as though, like its subject, it were coming into being even as we looked upon it.

In the 1990s, Artschwager also returned to the source material of current events as documented in the newspaper. In 1995, he cut out a newspaper photograph of a group of young military recruits and gridded it out as the study for a painting. The photograph accompanied an article titled “A Life of Solitude and Obsessions,” published in on May 4, 1995. The figure at the center of the image was the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, but the title could equally aptly be applied to the artist’s own life. The painting made from this image, Natural Selection (1995), clearly recalls Artschwager’s early painting Sailors (1966), where the faces of seemingly innocent recruits belie the potentially sinister activity that they have either been conscripted into or have freely decided to engage in. Consideration of the two paintings side by side reveals a change not only in the social function of news reporting but in its reception. Just as the palette of the paintings has shifted from light to dark, so had the manner in which news photography was viewed: the readers of the newspaper used for Natural Selection had become more fearful than trusting of their public servants. The photograph had become an unreliable informant, not because photography itself had changed, but because the beliefs projected onto it had become more cynical and complex.

As a trained scientist, Artschwager did what he did best—he looked closer. An untitled work of 1996 is a solo portrait of McVeigh, undertaken as if to examine what evil might look like up close, and what might be the limits of an image’s ability to present identity. It was followed in 2003 by three portraits, further studies in the illegibility and subjectivity of representation. Their subjects were the then incumbent U.S. President George W. Bush ; the terrorist ;

PRESS KIT - RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER ! 17 and Artschwager himself. The portraits were painted on bagasse panels mounted on Celotex, a surface that scumbled the paint and subsequently the image more than Celotex alone.37

It is interesting that the image Artschwager saw in the bathroom mirror every morning was one he believed comparable to the images of polarizing public figures that he saw in the newspaper each day. All these representations were equally mysterious, equally abstract. The face of things had no meaning; meaning came from the observer, not from the observed. Sad, happy, hateful, bemused— the content of the image was projected by each of its viewers out of the knowledge of the world they claimed for themselves. George W. Bush, Osama bin Laden, and Richard Artschwager, ordinary guy, all looked like what they were expected to look like from the observer’s point of view. Art proved to be a vehicle of the imagination, completely disconnected from reality in terms of meaning but not in terms of experience.

As an antidote to the reflection entailed in this series, Artschwager moved toward making his most recent body of paintings around 2004. These works were imbued with further meditations on mortality, but he now permitted himself to flood the compositions with painted color, as well as to inset pieces of brightly colored Formica. Color had haunted his work in occasional appearances since the early 1970s—as the gold orb, for example, that represents a peach in Bowl of Peaches on Glass Table (1973) and an egg yolk on a plate in Rights of Man (1991). Now he was finally able to fit color into his practice in more than a tentative way.38 In Light Bulbs (2007) color floods the room, and it would proceed to dominate his work in the first decade of the new millennium.

Artschwager had already been working with the idea of painting staged settings in a series of paintings made from still life setups in his studio: he positioned a group of objects on a table, draped them with a tablecloth, and from them made paintings that looked like fantastic images of New Mexico. He liked the images’ ambivalence about whether they conveyed landscapes or still lifes; they embraced the ambiguity inherent in our experience of art and life. These setups enabled Artschwager to move more readily toward his imagination in the Post-Impressionist–informed paintings, which the infusion of color imbues with an aura of the uncanny.39

This late assertion of color has been a real game-changer for Artschwager. In works such as Table (Somewhat) (2007) he has revisited his original Formica tables, now using bright, highly keyed color. This recent series of sculptures capitalizes on the cultural verity of facsimiles of high-end modern design that now permeate our everyday lives, in ready-made products by manufacturers such as IKEA. In this context Artschwager’s objects are completely familiar, even as they glow with artifice. Their faux surfaces and abstracted forms now present a ubiquitous vernacular aesthetic. Similarly, Artschwager’s brilliant Exclamation Point (Chartreuse) (2008) is wildly different from the group of Formica and black wood exclamation points that he made in the 1960s. Infused with phosphorescent color, its edges bristle with energy. Exuberant expressions of joy and optimism, such works have the vigor of a twentysomething right out of art school. Assertive and wholly new, they reveal a constant vision attuned to the tenor of the present.

Over the last five years, Artschwager has been focusing on drawing, working in oil pastel, charcoal, and graphite and primarily using the landscape format of his very first artworks from the 1950s. Allowing his imagination to take flight, across the radiant pages of these remarkable works. The watermelon shape that first inhabited Plowed Field and Grove (1962) has now come indoors, off the dusty horizon. Floating in space like a blp, it animates the austere room that Artschwager has spent decades filling with his imagination. With an eye honed through a lifetime of serious looking, he is staring down the unknown road ahead. Macadam (2008) is an image of a wide road leading out over the edge of a horizon, and In the Driver’s Seat (2008) shows a solitary man liberated from gravity, steering himself out into the future. As Artschwager has stated, his perspective is that of a lonely romantic, unsure whether anyone else can join him on his journey: “This is what I am involved with, the mechanics of looking at things, but the romance of it is that it is a lost way of looking at things.”40 And perhaps this is the fate of the scientist turned artist—to have a perspective uniquely his own, embodied in an oeuvre that is absolutely original.

PRESS KIT - RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER ! 18

II. NOUVEAU MUSEE NATIONAL DE MONACO

The NMNM reveals the Principality of Monaco’s heritage and sheds light on contemporary creation through temporary exhibitions in its two locations – Villa Paloma and Villa Sauber. This approach is part and parcel of an unusual territory whose history has always been marked by the dialogue between artistic, cultural and scientific disciplines as well as the support given to creators, thinkers and researchers.

EXHIBITIONS AT NOUVEAU MUSEE NATIONAL DE MONACO

VILLA PALOMA

CURRENT EXHIBITION

Richard Artschwager ! The exhibition is organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in association with the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. Curator : Jennifer Gross, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts Scientific coordination of the exhibition in Monaco : Cristiano Raimondi (NMNM) La Table des Matières : Oeuvre du mois : John Baldessari, Mountain Climber (Incomplete) / Passers By / Confrontations, 1992, UBS Art Collection February 20 – May 11, 2014

UPCOMING EXHIBITION

Gilbert & George Art Exhibition Gilbert and George are the subject of a retrospective built within a single private collection and number of works that range through four decades of a "life dedicated to art, shared thoughts, social documents," and rarely seen early drawings. Curators : Gilbert & George June 14 – November 2, 2014

PAST EXHIBITIONS

Promenades d’amateurs, Regard(s) sur une Collection Particulière Curators : Marie-Claude Beaud(NMNM) et Loïc Le Groumellec La Table des Matières : Oeuvre du mois : Photographs by Constantin Brancuis, Collection NMNM October 23, 2013 – January 5, 2014

ERIK BOULATOV, aintings and drawings, 1966 à 2013 Curators : Marie Claude Beaud et Cristiano Raimondi (NMNM) La Table des Matières : Oeuvre du mois : Drawings by Ed Ruscha, UBS Art Collection June 28 - September 29 2013

MONACOPOLIS Architecture, Urbanism and Urbanisation in Monaco, Realisations and Projects – 1858-2012 Curator : Nathalie Rosticher Giordano (NMNM) La Table des Matières : Oeuvre du mois : Matthias Hoch, Paris #31, 1999 January 19 – May 12, 2013

PRESS KIT - RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER ! 19

Thomas Schütte. Houses In collaboartion with Castello di Rivoli, curators : Andrea Bellini et Dieter Schwarz La Table des Matières : Oeuvres du Mois : series of drawings by Aldo Rossi July 7‐ November 11, 2012

Groupe SIGNE 1971 – 1974 L’art de la rue au Musée ? Curators : Groupe Signe Inauguration of La Table des Matières, a library, a social space and forum conceived for NMNM by Jonathan Olivares – curator : François Larini (NMNM) Œuvre du Mois : Sans titre 2003-2009, series of 6 drawings by Simon Jacquard. April 21 – June 17, 2012

LE SILENCE Une fiction Curator : Simone Menegoi, Associated Curator : Cristiano Raimondi (NMNM) February 2 – April 3, 2012

3 exhibitions + 1 Film La Table des Matières, pilot of the final space, by Jonathan Olivares, Curator : François Larini (NMNM) Du Rocher à Monte‐Carlo, Premières photographies originales de la Principauté de Monaco, 1860‐1880 Curator : Nathalie Rosticher Giordano (NMNM) Projection of Letter on the blind, For the use of those who see, 2007 by Javier Téllez (Coll. NMNM) Curator Cristiano Raimondi (NMNM) Caroline de Monaco, portraits by Karl Lagerfeld, Helmut Newton, Francesco Vezzoli, Andy Warhol et Robert Wilson Curator : Marie-Claude Beaud (NMNM) October 16, 2011‐ January 8, 2012

Souvenirs of Mysterious Seas, from the Expedition to the Aquarium A project by Mark Dion Co-Curators : Sarina Basta et Cristiano Raimondi (NMNM) April 12 - September 30, 2011

La Carte d’après Nature A project by Thomas Demand Associate Curator : Cristiano Raimondi (NMNM) September 18, 2010‐ Feruary 22, 2011

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VILLA SAUBER

UPCOMING EXHIBITION

Portraits d’Intérieurs The exhibition, presents interventions by 5 artists in the different spaces of Villa Sauber : Marc-Camille Chaimowicz, Danica Dakic, Brice Dellsperger, Nick Mauss et Laure Prouvost stage replicas of interiors, playing with all the formal codes of decoration : wallpapers, furniture, fabric, carpets, mirrors, ceramic objects... Co-curators : Celia Bernasconi and Cristiano Raimondi, NMNM July 10 – October 19, 2014

PAST EXHIBTIONS

MONACOPOLIS, Architecture, Urbanism and Decors in Monte-Carlo Curator : Nathalie Rosticher Giordano (NMNM) June 17, 2013 – February 23, 2014

MONACOPOLIS, Architecture, Urbanism and Urbanisation in Monaco, Realisations and Projects – 1858-2012 Commissaire : Nathalie Rosticher Giordano (NMNM) January 19 – June 2, 2013

KEES Van Dongen, L’atelier Curator : Nathalie Rosticher Giordano (NMNM) June 15– November 25, 2012

Princesse Grace : More than an Image An exhibition by the students of Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design for the “Pringle of Scotland Archive Project”. Associate curator : Marie-Claude Beaud (NMNM) April 3 – May 20, 2012

Looking up... on aura tout vu presents the de Galéa Collection Curators : Béatrice Blanchy (NMNM) et Lydia Kamitsis June 22, 2011 – January 29, 2012

Looking up... Yinka Shonibare MBE Curator : Nathalie Rosticher Giordano (NMNM) June 8, 2010 - April 30, 2011

Etonne Moi ! Serge Diaghilev et les Ballets Russes Curators : Nathalie Rosticher Giordano (NMNM) et Lydia Iovleva July 9 – September 27, 2009

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ORGANISATION CHART NOUVEAU MUSEE NATIONAL DE MONACO

PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD PRESIDENT OF THE ACQUISITION COMMITTEE H.R.H. The Princess of Hanover

DIRECTION Director : Marie-Claude Beaud Executive Secretary: Fiorella Del Prato

ADMINISTRATIVE AND FINANCIAL DEPARTMENT Administrative and Financial Manager : Agnès Mondielli Administrative and Financial Assistant : Danièle Batti

TICKETING OFFICERS Robert Pelazza, Christine Mikalef

SCIENTIFIC DEPARTMENT Chief Curator : Nathalie Giordano-Rosticher Curator : Célia Bernasconi Assistant to the Curator : Angélique Malgherini Collection Registrar : Emilie Tolsau Costumes Registrar : Anne-Sophie Loussouarn Restorer specialised in set-design models: Vincent Farelly Documentation : Jean-Charles Peyranne

Production Manager : Emmanuelle Capra Assistant to the Production Manager : Damien L'Herbon de Lussats Technical Manager : Daniel Montuori Assistant to the Technical Manager : Benjamin Goinard

DEVELOPMENT DEPARTMENT Head of Development and International Projects : Cristiano Raimondi Assistant Development and International Projects : Benjamin Laugier Communication and PR Manager : Elodie Biancheri

PUBLICS DEPARTMENT Head of Publics : François Larini Cultural Coordinator : Coline Matarazzo Security Officers: Gérard Angibeau, Jonathan Brotons, Henri Cavandoli, Florentin Certaldi, Yves Cheymol

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MEMBERS OF THE BOARD Valerio Adami Jean-Luc Biamonti Daniel Boeri Jean Castellini Jean-Charles Curau Lorenzo Fusi Marie-Pierre Gramaglia Paul Massero Pierre Nouvion

MEMBERS OF THE ACQUISITION COMMITTEE Marie-Claude Beaud Andrea Bellini Martine Fresia Carl de Lencquesaing Pierre Nouvion Claude Palmero Pierre Passebon

MEMBERS OF THE SCIENTIFIC COMMITTE Pierre Nouvion, Président Manuel Borja-Villel Kynaston McShine Chiara Parisi

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PARTNERS

THE PRINCELY GOVERNMENT

True to the artistic patronage tradition intiated by the Princes of Monace and throught the Direction of Cultural Affairs, the Government of Monaco pursues an active cultural policy favoring the blossoming of the arts in the Principalité and contributing to the diffusion of culture to a large public .

As conveyor of the influence of the Principality worldwide and major sector of the local policy, culture benfits from about 5% of the States’ budget, mainly dedicated to support local institutions and artists, develop a cultural programme, elaborate projects relating to the heritage and finance the functioning of adapted cultural equipments.

UBS AG

UBS's global wealth management business draws on its 150-year heritage to provide a comprehensive range of products and services individually tailored for clients around the world.

UBS & Contemporary Art :

UBS has a rich history of actively supporting cultural and artistic endeavors across the world, with a focus on promotion, collection and educational activities in the world of contemporary art.

Longstanding commitments to the internationally renowned art fairs Art Basel in Basel, Miami Beach and Hong Kong (from 2014 on), our own UBS Art Collection and the Swiss based UBS Art Competence Center offer a comprehensive and varied platform for UBS clients and art enthusiasts to participate in the art scene, and testify to the passion for contemporary art which UBS shares with its clients.

ASSOCIATION DES AMIS DU NMNM

"Prince Albert II of Monaco has expressed an interest in creating a New Museum, hoping to increase the presence of the Visual Arts in the Principality. Together, we must all, as Monegasque residents, and as friends to the Principality, take on this project so close to our Prince’s heart. In order to reinforce support in the Prince’s undertaking of this exciting adventure, we have created the Association des Amis du NMNM.

Bettina Ragazzoni Cover President [email protected] TEL : +377 98 98 49 37

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PRACTICAL INFORMATION

NMNM / VILLA PALOMA 56, boulevard du Jardin Exotique +377 98.98.48.60 www.nmnm.mc facebook : Nouveau Musée National de Monaco

BY BUS Line 2, going to Jardin Exotique, stop “Villa Paloma” Line 5, going to & stop “Hôpital” access through pubic lift

BY CAR Parking “Jardin Exotique”, access through Bd. du Jardin Exotique and Bd. de Belgique

FROM THE TRAIN STATION Bus line 2, going to Jardin Exotique, stop “Villa Paloma”

EXHIBITION DATES RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER ! February 20 – May 11, 2013

OPENING HOURS Every day, 10am-6pm

ENTRANCE RATES NMNM ticket : 6€ Free for everyone under 26 years old, scholar and children groups, Monegasques, members of the Association des Amis du NMNM, members ICOM and CIMAM, job-seekers, disabled people Combined ticket NMNM / Jardin Exotique / Musée Anthropologique de Monaco: 10€ Free entrance the first Sunday of each month

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