Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition of new paintings by Richard Artschwager.
Richard Artschwager was born in Washington D.C. in 1923 but spent most of his childhood in New Mexico. He entered Cornell University in 1941, and, after serving three years in the Army in Europe, he completed his B.A. in physical science in 1948. Shortly thereafter, he moved to New York City. He then began to study art in the studio school of Amédée Ozenfant and also worked designing and building furniture. After a disastrous fire in his workshop, he began to make the paintings and sculptures for which he is best known using pre-fab materials such as formica and celotex. Artschwager began to show with Leo Castelli in 1963 and he has continued to exhibit internationally since then. His work was the subject of a large retrospective in 1988 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His art is represented in private and public collections around the world including the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Fondation Cartier in Paris and the Kunsthalle in Basel, Switzerland. Richard Artschwager lives and works near Hudson, New York.
The exhibition will consist of five new paintings. Four paintings could be loosely categorized as landscapes drawn from the artist's imagination. The fifth painting is a group portrait of an anonymous crowd of adults and children. The images are mostly black, white and gray with an occasional disruptive use of pattern and color using either paint or formica. The scenes rendered shift from sharp focus to a soft blur and show a wide range of surface textures and degrees of flatness. Through this attention to both the optical and the tactile, Artschwager engages the space inside and outside of the painting exploring the relationship between the viewer, the wall and the work.