PaceWildenstein inaugurates new location with John Chamberlain exhibition

Featuring Neptune’s Cap, a monumental work originally conceived for Donald Judd  

NEW YORK, October 12, 2005 — PaceWildenstein presents John Chamberlain: Recent Sculpture from October 21 through December 3, 2005 at the gallery’s newest space in Chelsea, 545 West 22nd Street. Featuring sculptures made in 2004 and 2005 in Chamberlain’s Shelter Island, New York studio, the centerpiece of this exhibition is Neptune’s Cap, an 8’ x 6’ x 4’ steel sculpture. The work was originally conceived two decades ago for artist Donald Judd’s pool in Marfa, Texas, but never realized. Chamberlain recently returned to the idea and finished the piece this summer. A full color catalogue with an essay by art historian Irving Sandler accompanies the exhibition.

In his essay, Mr. Sandler notes, “The synthesis of painting and sculpture is central to Chamberlain’s work. His early metal constructions were influenced by David Smith’s works, but around the late 1950s, they increasingly alluded to de Kooning’s Gesture or Action Painting. As Chamberlain remarked, it was the tendency with which he felt ‘intuitively in tune.’ He was taken with the roughness, muscularity, and energy of de Kooning’s painting and the ambiguity of its shifting and interpenetrating open planes. These gave Chamberlain permission to use smashed car parts that seemed to be in constant motion. But he was not satisfied with Gesture Painting’s two-dimensions, and he translated its flat forms into bulky and swelling volumes, both in reliefs and in-the-round sculptures. In the process, Chamberlain transformed Gesture Painting and achieved an original style.”  

The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, recently opened John Chamberlain: Foam sculptures (1966-1979) and Photographs (1989-2004) at the 2005 Open House. Approximately thirty foam pieces are included in this exhibition, which is the first comprehensive survey of this work since 1966. In addition to the sculptures, Chinati will also show a wide selection of panoramic photographs by Chamberlain taken over the last 20 years. The exhibition will remain on view through May 2006.

John Chamberlain  (b. 1927, Rochester, IN) studied at The Art Institute of Chicago and Black Mountain College in North Carolina.  In addition to working with steel, the medium for which he is best known, Chamberlain made films in the late 1960s and has employed various other media such as chrome photography, foam, foil, ink on canvas, oil and Plexiglas. Exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, Chamberlain’s work has been included in the São Paolo Bienal (1961, 1994), the Venice Biennale (1964), the Whitney Biennial (1973, 1987) and Documenta, Kassel, Germany (1982) and has been the subject of over 100 solo shows, traveling exhibitions and retrospectives including ones at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1971), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1986) and, more recently, in Germany at the Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden (1991), the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden (1991) and at the Stedelijk Museum in The Netherlands (1996).

Chamberlain has been twice awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1966 and 1977) and in 1990 was elected a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, New York.  Some years following his residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, Chamberlain received the school’s 1993 Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, and in the same year was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture from the International Sculpture Center, Washington, DC. In 1997 Chamberlain was named a recipient of The National Arts Club Artists Award, New York, and in 1999 he received the Distinction in Sculpture Honor from the Sculpture Center, New York.

Chamberlain’s work can be found in over 50 public collections worldwide including, among others: The Art Institute of Chicago; The Chinati Foundation/La Fundación Chinati, Marfa, TX; Dia Foundation for the Arts, Beacon, NY; Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, Italy; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; IVAM Centro Julio González, Valencia, Spain; Los Angeles County Museum; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Tate Gallery, London, Great Britain; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

John Chamberlain currently lives and works on Shelter Island, New York.

Additional information on John Chamberlain is available upon request by contacting Jennifer Benz Joy, Public Relations Associate, at 212.421.3292 or via email at jjoy@pacewildenstein.com