Big ideas, precise gestures: John Chamberlain’s intimately scaled sculptures

‘Do you talk to a painter about what kind of paint he’s using?’ John Chamberlain once asked, defiantly. The quintessential rebel-artist, who was still actively creating when he passed away in 2011 at 84, rejected easy interpretations of his work that dwelled on his choice of media. It’s true that he forged imposing abstract sculpture from weathered auto parts, crushing and twisting the industrial found objects and remaking them through physical action and assemblage. But to Chamberlain, the material was just one element of his dynamic practice, combining bold gestures with technical mastery and always a hint of mischief. Occupying a position between Abstract Expressionism, Neo-Dada and Pop Art, Chamberlain’s oeuvre defies categorisation — both Andy Warhol and Donald Judd were admirers, displaying his work at the Factory and the Chinati Foundation respectively.

Bold contrasts

To make his large-scale sculptures, Chamberlain had to wield force. The extreme actions needed to bend, crumple, twist, and smash the pieces of scrap metal — running them over with a truck, feeding them into an open-mouth metal crusher — contributed to the physicality of his work. Chamberlain paired these works with poetical titles (Wanderingwhisper, Anteambulo Quincunx, EUPHORIAINAHAT) that added a layer of emotion to the impenetrable sculpture. His interest in wordplay and poetry stemmed from his days at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he developed impactful friendships with poets and intellectuals like Charles Olson and Robert Duncan.

Wide latitude

Throughout his career Chamberlain made excursions from his signature monumental assemblages of vibrant car parts into other materials — and sizes. Out of a weariness with those automobile associations, and perhaps to divorce his work from that gleaming material’s legibility, he began experimenting with polyurethane foam, Plexiglass, brown paper bags and aluminium foil. Those materials allowed him to move from the grand gesture to the small (and back), producing intimate works whose physicality and presence are of an entirely different kind.

This month fans of the boundary-pushing sculptor have much to celebrate on the artist’s birthday, 16 April, with the opening of two exhibitions and the release of a new book. Firstly, the two extremes of dimensional range in Chamberlain’s body of work are on view in New York. On 15 April through 27 May (and online until 31 May), John Chamberlain: Foil and Form, a selling exhibition open to the public at Christie’s New York in partnership with The John Chamberlain Estate, will showcase a selection of intimately scaled works that offer a unique vantage from which to explore the artist’s fearless and wide-ranging practice, including his influential handmade aluminium foil sculptures.

Meanwhile, around the corner a grouping of the monumental sculptures that were modelled upon these foils will go on view in Chamberlain Goes Outdoors on Rockefeller Plaza from 16 April to 29 May, organised by Tishman Speyer. A new book published by Assouline, Living with Chamberlain, explores the spatial presence and power of Chamberlain’s work — at home yet never fading into the background in the living spaces of featured friends, artists and collectors, including Rick Owens, Solange Knowles and Rainer Judd.

Two of the tabletop sculptures in Foil and Form, MARRIMENT (1999) and NIGHTBIRDS (1999) are in Chamberlain’s most recognisable visual language of painted, crumpled steel, while two others hail from his Tonks series, made disassembled toy trucks and cars the artist purchased en masse from an abandoned Tonka toy factory. Seven other works — the tallest just under 14 inches — are part of Chamberlain’s exploration of aluminium foil beginning in 1966.

Chamberlain made the Foils without tools, bending and twisting elongated strings of foil together by hand. He referred to these works as ‘instant sculptures’, momentarily made and manipulated with his fingers. Not figurative and not entirely abstract, they take on an uncanny organic shape that, as ever, resets the gaze. Their intensely worked forms emphasise the gestures of process — in this case one that takes place in the palm of a hand.

Visit John Chamberlain: Foil and Form at Christie’s New York from 15 April through 27 May (and until 31 May online). Works are available through Christie’s Private Sales.