Best known for his sculptures that brought the Abstract Expressionist style into three-dimensional forms, John Chamberlain was born on April 16, 1927 in Rochester, Indiana and grew up in Chicago, Illinois. After serving in the Navy from 1943 to 1946, Chamberlain attended the Art Institute of Chicago from 1951 to 1952. During this time he began to make flat, welded sculpture influenced by the work of David Smith. Chamberlain taught and studied sculpture at Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina from 1955 to 1956. In 1966, Chamberlain received his first of two John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships, intended for men and women who have "already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts," as stated by the foundation.
Building on his earlier welded sculpture, in 1957 Chamberlain began incorporating scrap metal from cars into his work. From 1959 onward, he concentrated on sculpture built entirely of crushed automobile parts. Chamberlain's first major solo exhibition was held in 1960 at Martha Jackson Gallery, New York. In the early 1960s, Chamberlain's work was widely acclaimed and his sculpture was included in “The Art of Assemblage” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1961. Chamberlain showed frequently at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, and in 1964, was exhibited at the Venice Biennale.
From 1963 to 1965, Chamberlain experimented with other mediums and created geometric paintings with sprayed automobile paint. In 1966, he began a series of sculptures made of rolled, folded, and tied urethane foam. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, held a retrospective of his work in 1971, followed by a retrospective held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1986; the museum co-published, “John Chamberlain: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculpture 1954-1985”, authored by Julie Sylvester.
Chamberlain’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Chinati Foundation, Marfa; the Tate Modern, London; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others.
John Chamberlain passed away on December 21, 2011 in New York City.
By Isabella Mason
Mnuchin Gallery in New York is hosting an exhibition “Chamberlain/de Kooning” that will be on view through January 28, 2017.
“Chamberlain/de Kooning” is an exhibition of sculptures by John Chamberlain and paintings by Willem de Kooning, focussing specifically on the visual dialogue between Chamberlain’s career and the late paintings by de Kooning made during the 1970s and 1980s. Chamberlain was deeply influenced by the Abstract Expressionist painters, particularly de Kooning, which reflected in his sculptures that translates the energy, gesture, and action-based processes of Abstract Expressionism into three-dimensional forms. The exhibition brings together his twelve sculptures along with seven paintings by de Kooning. The sculptures represent two distinct episodes of Chamberlain’s career. Works spanning from 1958 to 1964 illustrate the period where the artist starts the use of his signature medium of welded steel, while the later group of works hails from the mid-1970s, marking Chamberlain’s return to his use of automobile parts. The paintings by de Kooning also represent two iconic bodies of his late work, including four major examples of abstract landscape paintings from the 1970s, in which the artist’s vibrating strokes of bright blues and flesh pinks evoke the sea, sand, and coastal light of East Hampton, and a group of paintings from the 1980s where he transforms his richly impasto canvases of the previous decade into luminous compositions in which ribbons of color ripple and curve across pale, ethereal backdrops. Presented together, the crevices contained in Chamberlain's crumpled sheets of painted enamel evoke the layered folds of color in de Kooning's canvases of the 1970s, while the gleaming, rounded curves of the sculptor's bent fenders echo the smoothly arcing lines of the painter's works from 1980s.
