Richard Artschwager
Shopping Figures, 2002
Charcoal on paper, signed and dated on lower right recto
25 x 31 inches (63.5 × 78.74 cm)

Courtesy of Ann Artschwager

Selected by Gary Garrels

Richard Artschwager forged a unique path in art from the early 1950s through the early 21st century, making the visual comprehension of space and the everyday objects that occupy it strangely unfamiliar. Artschwager moved through different media, materials, and visual preoccupations with a voraciousness, intelligence, and wit that allowed him to escape any box the art world might have wanted to construct around him.

In fact, the more mundane the object, it seems, the more appealing it was as fodder for Artschwager's fertile imagination, and none were more banal than the six - Door, Window, Table, Basket, Mirror, Rug - that together ignited a multi-decade obsession beginning in the 1970s. His Six Objects series, highlighting these staples of the everyday, began in the early 1970s and became a central vocabulary in Artschwager's drawing, sculpture, and painting until the end of his career. Through drawings, paintings, objects and multiples, he generated hundreds of permutations of these domestic objects, variously exaggerating perspective, surface, and scale to often surreal and comic effect. Artschwager's highest devotion, perhaps, was not to art but to the art of looking, and looking long enough to see the world as it is: strange, weird, funny, and wonderfully confounding.

Richard Artschwager has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Artschwager's work is held in public collections such as The Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tate Modern, London; Tate Britain, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Detroit Institute of Arts; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.