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In his recent exhibition of painting and sculpture at Sprüth Magers Berlin, Richard Artschwager continues his career-long investigation of the material, spatial, and perceptual qualities of art and, by extension, articulates the complexity of the act of looking and perceiving.

Artschwager mines these slippages with his signature light touch. His incisive playfulness finds greatest expression in Exclamation Point (Chartreuse), a series of three Crayola-colored exclamation points whose physical tension, combined with a seeming weightlessness, elicits the ebullience that the typographic symbol connotes. His explosive Three Splatter Chairs evokes a similar exuberance and humor. Installed in corners high on the gallery walls, the three squashed chairs toy with two- and three-dimensional space while cheekily calling attention to their resemblance to crushed spiders or flies.

When considered on their own, his sculptural renderings of chairs, a table, a piano, and other everyday objects made from wood and Formica seem stolid by comparison. When read as a site or nexus/network, however, the interplay of color, texture, and form works toward creating the free-flowing physical space that Artschwager deems the natural habitat for art, a nonpurposive, whimsical place to "celebrate what is generally meant by a respect for life."

Currently Showing:
Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Sept. 4, 2009 – Feb. 14, 2010, hamburgerbahnhof.de

"Richard Artschwager" originally appeared in the September 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' September 2009 Table of Contents.