Search results for ""author john chamberlain""

The crumpled sculptures by American artist John Chamberlain, welded together from deformed car body parts, revolutionised the art world back in the 1950s. Through the unusual use of industrially prefabricated materials and their completely free repurposing, he released new processes of artistic forms and a consumer-oriented aesthetic. At first assigned to Nouveau Réalisme, his work at the same time evinces relationships with Abstract Realism and Minimal Art, but ultimately asserts a great measure of autonomy in its form of expression. As early as the mid-1950s, he turned to the industrial scrap from cars, which he squashed, pressed into shape and welded together. Just as important as the form is the interplay of colours which make his works dazzle and sometimes bring them into a certain proximity with colour-happy Pop Art. In addition to his internationally renowned sculptural work, Chamberlain occupied himself intensively with photography, a theme extensively addressed in this book. Sculpture and photography interact directly with each other. Unlike the sculptures, which are positioned in their materiality, Chamberlain's photographs are marked by great blurring and fleetingness. At the same time, they absorb the element of movement in space. Chamberlain himself put it in terms of 'bending space'. One may think of them, even more readily than of his sculptures, as the spontaneous gestural structures of Abstract Expressionist paintings. Text in English and German.

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The first publication of the unknown poetry of a major twentieth-century sculptorIn 1955, long before he became famous for his abstract metal sculptures, John Chamberlain lived at Black Mountain College, writing poetry alongside Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson. By the time he moved to New York City in 1956 and began to develop his unique sculptural style, Chamberlain had completed a series of poems with marginal comments by Olson and himself, but the work remained unpublished and unknown—until now. In Black Mountain Chamberlain, Julie Sylvester presents a facsimile of this fascinating typescript along with an introduction based on interviews conducted with Chamberlain in the 1980s, conversations in which he described the strong connections between the poems and his later work.At first glance, Chamberlain's delicate and quiet poems appear to be the antithesis of his bold and brash sculpture. But in the introduction Chamberlain says that in fact the way he made poems at Black Mountain influenced the way he made sculptures throughout his career: "It's actually doing things in the same way, with words or with metal. It's all in the fit."Beautifully produced, Black Mountain Chamberlain reveals a remarkable and unexpected new side of an important twentieth-century artist.Distributed for Edition Julie Sylvester

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