The three Chamberlain foil sculptures outside Rockefeller Center.
Photo: courtesy Tishman Speyer.
By Richard Whiddington
It’s said that friends of artist and sculptor John Chamberlain would wait expectantly for him to finish a pack of cigarettes so as to watch how he’d crimp and contort its hollow shell. Beginning in the late 1960s, Chamberlain applied the same bare-handed attention to other everyday materials, including paper bags, foam, wire, and aluminum foil.
After two decades of crafting the crushed car sculptures for which he became best known, Chamberlain returned to humble aluminum foil in the 1980s, making a group of 29 palm-sized, freestanding sculptures. It was in some ways his ideal material, one both pliant and resistant, whose every crinkle evidenced the hand of the artist. To make the works, he twisted foil into elongated tubes, which were then bent and woven together into beguiling contortions.