Richard Artschwager

Richard Artschwager was a highly regarded artist whose distinctive presence shaped the contemporary American art scene for nearly fifty years. He aimed to confound traditional categories, excelling at creating pictorial and textual confusion through his remarkable stylistic hybrids.

Biography of Richard Artschwager

Richard Artschwager was born to Ernst Artschwager, a Prussian botanist, and Eugenia Brodsky, a Ukrainian artist and designer. The family relocated from Washington D.C. to Las Cruces, New Mexico, where the artist spent his childhood. His mother, who had studied at the Corcoran School of Art and the National Academy of Design, took Richard on art trips into the surrounding desert, journeys he later retraced in his work.

A bright and inquisitive child, Artschwager initially showed a natural talent for art, creating a "shockingly accurate" portrait of his father. However, his focus shifted towards science and mathematics, inspired by his father's background. He began studying these subjects at Cornell University in 1941, but his education was interrupted by World War II.

Serving in the European Army, the artist participated in the Battle of the Bulge and later worked in administrative and intelligence roles in Frankfurt and Vienna. In Vienna, he met and married his first wife, Elfriede Wejmelka, in 1946. They moved to the United States in 1947, and Artschwager completed his BA at Cornell in 1948.

After completing his degree, Artschwager was torn between the arts and sciences. Following a period of introspection, he chose art, finding it more unpredictable than science, which he saw as merely uncovering what already exists. Despite his decision, he felt that the pressure to "be original" in art was akin to "jumping off of a cliff." To support himself, the artist took on various temporary jobs, including baby photographer, bank teller, and lathe turner, while studying at the New York City studio school of Amédée Ozenfant. There, he was introduced to the minimalist language of Purism.

By 1953, Artschwager had established himself as a furniture designer, creating simple modern pieces that provided a steady income, especially with the birth of his first daughter. However, a fire in 1958 destroyed his studio and inventory, forcing him to rebuild his business. The skills he developed as a furniture designer later influenced his work as a sculptor and installation artist.

In 1959, Artschwager held his first exhibition at the Art Directions Gallery in New York, showcasing paintings and watercolors of Southwestern landscapes. The following year, he was commissioned by the Catholic Church to build portable altars for ships, using low-budget industrial laminate Formica. This material's ability to mimic various surfaces with a kitsch Pop Art sheen inspired the artist to incorporate it into his art.

During the 1960s, Richard Artschwager's career gained momentum with a series of exhibitions. Boosted by newfound confidence, he submitted slides and a cover letter to New York's Leo Castelli Gallery, a leading venue for contemporary art. The gallery accepted him for a group exhibition alongside Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Claes Oldenburg. Castelli held his first solo exhibition in 1965, and Artschwager remained with the gallery for around 30 years.

While teaching at UC Davis, he was inspired by fellow faculty members like William T. Wiley, Robert Arneson, Roy De Forest, and Wayne Thiebaud, who were exploring Minimalist languages. Artschwager sought to refine his own artistic language, leading to the development of his "blps" series (pronounced "blips"). From the late 1960s until the end of his career, Artschwager used the "blp" mark as a trademark, exploring how this distinctive black symbol could transform spaces.

In 1971, the artist separated from his first wife, Elfriede, and married artist and writer Catherine Kord in 1972. During the late 1980s, he became highly successful and employed a team of studio assistants for his large-scale site-specific works. After divorcing Kord in 1989, he married Molly O'Gorman, with whom he had two children. In 1991, he met and fell in love with Ann Sebring while exhibiting at the Mary Boone Gallery. Following his divorce from O'Gorman in 1993, Artschwager married Sebring, remaining together until his death.

Known for his playful and chaotic personal life, the artist's eclectic creative ambitions mirrored his personal experiences. By the end of the century, he felt he had achieved a deep understanding of both his personal and artistic life, stating in 2000 that he had "total insight into every aspect of my life." Richard Artschwager passed away in 2013 in Albany, New York, following a stroke.

Richard Artschwager's Famous Artworks

"Handle" (1962)

As Christopher Knight, art critic for the Los Angeles Times, noted, Richard Artschwager's sculptural piece "Handle" is often considered his breakthrough work: "A rectangle 4 feet wide and 30 inches high is beautifully crafted from a cylinder of honed and polished wood. Although three-dimensional like a sculpture, it hangs on the wall like a painting. Made of wood, like a painting's traditional frame, it only encloses a view of the wall behind it. Meant to be grasped, as any handle would, it cannot be touched because it is a work of art."

"Table With Pink Tablecloth" (1964)

The artist's most famous sculpture, "Table With Pink Tablecloth", represents a blend of Pop Art and Minimalism. The piece is a box veneered with colored Formica, creating the image of a wooden table with a square pink tablecloth draped over it. Created early in Artschwager's career, this piece is part of a series that explores the boundaries between real objects and their artistic representations. Artschwager referred to these works as "useful furniture with an overlay of representation." He was particularly inspired by the simplified forms in the Cubist art of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, as well as the minimalist still life paintings of Giorgio Morandi. Like these artists, Artschwager sought to translate two-dimensional depictions of reality into three-dimensional forms, describing this piece as "the way a table with a tablecloth is in a painting."

"Door" (1983-1984)

Throughout the 1980s, Artschwager reached a pivotal moment in his artistic career, further blurring the lines between reality and perception. This work is part of a series made from painted wood, building on his earlier Formica furniture sculptures and continuing his exploration of the interplay between ordinary objects and their representation in art.

This surreal installation creates a playful balance between illusionism and artifice. A replica of a door is installed in the gallery space, hinting at imaginative possibilities of escape. However, the overly polished wood grain and the cheap plastic handle emphasize its artificial quality. Positioned next to an enlarged black punctuation mark (a closed bracket), the door's flat, motif-like appearance is further accentuated. Artschwager remarked on works like this, saying, "What interests me is above all the line of demarcation between ordinary things and the ones we recognize as objects of art." 

"Book" (1987)

The sensuously glossy book appears to have fallen open at the center, revealing the matte, grainy texture of the flat pages inside. Resembling an open Bible on a pulpit, the book exudes a sense of grandeur and importance. Yet, there's no text — only tooled vertical lines — while the black, shiny exterior contradicts any suggestion of additional pages. This piece balances opposites, playing between realism and abstraction, two and three dimensions, and matte versus gloss surfaces. Books are a recurring motif in Artschwager's work, ranging from familiar forms to more abstract interpretations. He was particularly intrigued by books because they occupy a unique space between being a physical object and a flat, pictorial representation. This theme resonated deeply with his broader artistic exploration of the boundaries between reality and illusion.

"Osama" (2003)

One of the artist's most controversial paintings from his late period, "Osama", depicted Osama Bin Laden, just two years after the 9/11 attacks. However, the Gagosian Gallery chose not to include the work in their catalog for his 2003 solo exhibition, citing its potentially "incendiary nature." Other politically charged works from this time, though Artschwager himself refrained from stating his political stance, included depictions of George W. Bush, images of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and a self-portrait.

Mock Pianos Series (2012)

In 2012, the artist created a series of mock pianos that suggested the essence of the object through recognizable motifs. These works subtly reference modernist abstraction, particularly the pared-back geometry of Ukrainian artist Kazymyr Malevych. In these final pieces, Artschwager combined his trademark irreverent humor with an exploration of the boundaries between reality and art. The piano motif, rendered in abstract forms reminiscent of early twentieth-century avant-garde styles, became one of his last notable series.

Art Style of Richard Artschwager

After leaving behind his career as an independent cabinetmaker, Richard Artschwager transitioned to creating "furniture-like" sculptures using inexpensive industrial materials. He favored laminate Formica and Celotex, a roughly textured insulation board, which allowed him to replicate a variety of textures and surfaces that resonated with the kitschy aesthetics of Pop Art.

The artist was particularly intrigued by the symbolic meanings conveyed through linguistic signs. This fascination led to his "blps" series, in which he transformed punctuation marks into three-dimensional objects using a range of typically garish materials. These "cartoon-like" sculptures lifted the flat linguistic symbols off the page, revealing how these seemingly simple motifs could alter the gallery space in which they were placed — or displaced.

Keenly aware of the tension between the legacies of abstraction and the rise of Pop Art, Richard Artschwager embraced Pop Art’s celebration of suburban domesticity but filtered it through a minimalist approach to abstraction. This fusion created a unique tension between reality and conceptualism, inviting viewers to explore the intersections between everyday objects and art's relationship with them.

Artschwager's paintings could be seen as somewhat surrealistic in their depiction of familiar settings, like domestic interiors, that feel subtly off-kilter. These works showcase his ability to translate his unique structural combinations into two-dimensional forms. Through his paintings and drawings, the artist explored the dynamics of pictorialism, surrealism, and abstraction, often unsettling the traditional conventions of these mediums to disquieting effect.

Richard Artschwager: Influences on Contemporary Art

The artist's ability to blend the familiar with the unfamiliar has significantly influenced contemporary artists, especially those in the Neo-Geo movement. The exhibition Richard Artschwager, His Peers and Persuasion, 1963-1988 at the Daniel Weinberg Gallery in Los Angeles highlighted his impact alongside 16 contemporaries, including Haim Steinbach, Joe Goode, Allan McCollum, and Nancy Dwyer. Steinbach, for example, drew inspiration from Artschwager’s fascination with everyday items, using glossy shelves and eclectic displays to reframe ordinary objects in a gallery context.

The Neo Geo artists, known as "the Fantastic Four" — Ashley Bickerton, Jeff Koons, Peter Halley, and Meyer Vaisman — were influenced by Artschwager’s semi-abstract motifs, which merged geometric abstraction with popular culture. Halley and Bickerton, in particular, adopted a similar irreverent humor, adding a critical edge to their commentary on commercialization and industrialization.

In the UK, the Young British Artists (YBAs) of the 1990s mirrored Artschwager's fusion of Minimalist forms with Pop Art irreverence, as seen in early works by Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin. American sculptor Rachel Harrison has directly referenced the artist with her hybrid constructions. Her 2009 Venice Biennale installation included a recreated version of Artschwager's Table with Pink Tablecloth, blending objects like synthetic wigs and cardboard boxes with bulbous figurative forms.