Richard Artschwager's Maverick Retrospective at Whitney Museum

The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York is hosting a retrospective of Richard Artschwager, the maverick artist who has defied categorization since the late 1950s. Now ninety, Artschwager remains an outlier, neither Pop nor Minimalist, but incorporating elements of both and more. The exhibition, organized by Jennifer Gross, is Artschwager's second Whitney survey, the first having been curated by Richard Armstrong in 1988. Artschwager debuted at Leo Castelli's gallery in the 1960s at age forty-four. Despite his importance, only the Whitney and the Hammer Museum (the West Coast partner) have committed to this retrospective, a fact the article attributes to institutional timidity and lack of aesthetic conviction. Artschwager's work is characterized by conceptually sly, material strangeness. He began by painting photo-like images on acoustic panels, laying foundations for photorealism alongside Vija Celmins, Malcolm Morley, and Gerhard Richter. He then constructed dysfunctional furniture from Formica and laminates, conflating modernist design with minimal sculpture. His later works include rubberized horsehair boxes, signature "blp" lozenges, gigantic punctuation marks, perspectivally distorted doors, and wall-mounted chair shadows. The article notes that the exhibition downplays his more baroque, cartoonish pieces like 'Cross' (2004), but overall places him alongside H.C. Westermann, Bruce Nauman, and Eva Hesse as a seminal deformer of late modernist art.