Beschreibung:

John Chamberlain Mr. Moto 1963 Painted and chromium-plated steel. 73.7 x 76.2 x 68.6 cm. (29 x 30 x 27 in).
Provenance Leo Castelli Gallery, New York; Collection of Robert A. Rowan, Pasadena; Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles Exhibited Pasadena Art Museum, New American Sculpture, 11 February – 7 March, 1964; New York, Leo Castelli Gallery, John Chamberlain 11 April – 30 May, 1964; University of California, Irvine, A Selection from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Rowan, 2 – 21 May , 1967; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, A Selection from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Rowan, 2 June – 2 July, 1967; New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, John Chamberlain A Retrospective Exhibition, 22 December, 1971 - 27 February, 1972; Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, John Chamberlain 30 July – 5 October, 1986 Literature Pasadena Art Museum, New American Sculpture, Pasadena, 1964, Cat. No. 9 (llustrated); D. Waldman, John Chamberlain A Retrospective Exhibition, New York, 1971, p. 66, pl. 51(illustrated); J. Sylvester John Chamberlain A Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculpture 1954 – 1985, Los Angeles, 1986, p. 76 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay By the early 1960s Chamberlain had become a regular at junkyards and body shops. Sometimes he actually worked in junkyards, but more often he chose and collected pieces to pile up in his studio. Individual pieces were selected for their color and roundness,sometimes to be cut up and reshaped, in the studio, and occasionally even to be touched up or painted over with fresh autolacquer. Each piece was treated as an individual entity before it was returned to the pile on the floor. Chamberlain used a variety of tools: a slicer, a steel-cutting chisel, an acetylene torch, a band saw, a grinder, a truck, and a compactor. Each tool had a different impact on the metal; the rough edges left by a saw were as pleasing to the artist as the burn marks of the torch. After a gestation period, Chamberlain began to assemble some of these worked pieces into a configuration that maximized the volumes and the colors into a unique presence and attitude. (K. Kertess, "Color in the Round and Then Some: John Chamberlain's Work, 1954 - 1985," John Chamberlain A Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculpture 1954 - 1985, Los Angeles, 1986, p. 34) John Chamberlain has cajoled, crushed, melted, and embraced the detritus of American consumerism to create, casually and forcefully, sculptures whose provocative beauty is as visually brilliant as it is formally intelligent. Employing means as ordinary as his materials, he has reinvented casting and modeling and liberated them from expressive, technical, and aesthetic restraints. Moving out of both Cubist-Constructivist gridlock and the Surrealist symbolism that together threatened to trap so much sculpture of the 1950s, Chamberlain found a way to add the dimension of volume to the urgent spontaneity and procedural clarity so crucial to the Abstract Expressionist painters. Engaging chance and intuition, he transgressed lavishly the prohibition of color in sculpture, employing hues that ranged from the virginal to the lurid as major protagonists of sculptural structure. (ibid, p. 26). Read More