The Parrish Art Museum - East End Stories

Over a career that has spanned six decades, John Chamberlain has shown the uncanny ability to look at detritus in the same way other artists examine oil colors or bags of plaster. If it can be wadded, compressed, or squeezed, no substance is too humble for his regard. Chamberlain made Shortstop, his first sculpture using auto body parts, in 1957 while staying at Larry Rivers’s house in Southampton. Through this approach Chamberlain has created robust sculptures from even the most unlikely materials, such as abandoned automobile bodies, brown paper bags, aluminum foil, toy trucks, the sheared tops of vans, and even urethane foam. After prolonged stays in Sag Harbor and Northwest Woods, where he lived in a house and studio once owned by Elaine de Kooning, the sculptor settled on Shelter Island. Although Chamberlain’s work exemplifies avant-garde practice, his greatest sculptures share much in common with, among others, Hellenistic statues and Bernini’s carved marble figures. The sheer mass of his art, the way in which it interacts with light and shadow, and its implied motion are all attributes associated with traditional three-dimensional art. Chamberlain has explained pithily that he’s “intrigued with the idea of what I can do with material and I work with the material as opposed to enforcing some kind of will upon it.”
[Phyllis Tuchman]