John Chamberlain
(1927-2011)
John Chamberlain was born in Rochester, Indiana, in 1927 and grew up in Chicago, Illinois. After serving in the U.S. Navy during the mid-1940s, traveling throughout the Pacific and Mediterranean, he returned home and attended the Art Institute of Chicago between 1951 and 1952 before continuing his studies at Black Mountain College in North Carolina from 1955 to 1956. Key artistic and intellectual influences shaped his approach there, such as meeting prominent poets including Charles Olson (who was his teacher), Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley. In 1956, Chamberlain relocated to New York, and the following year created his first sculpture from an automobile fragment at the Long Island home of painter Larry Rivers, inspired by a discarded Ford convertible on the property. Chamberlain explained, “I took a fender...I drove over it a few times to rearrange its shape, which was the beginning of what I now know as process”.1 In 1961, his experimental approach earned him a place in The Art of Assemblage exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where his sculptures were presented in dialogue with Futurist, Surrealist, and Cubist works.
This instinctive and physical method became central to Chamberlain’s practice over the following decades. Galvanized steel, urethane foam, and mineral-coated Plexiglas became a part of Chamberlain’s work at the end of the 1960s. Although critics have often interpreted his use of crushed automobile parts as a commentary on the byproducts of postwar American industry, Chamberlain himself focused primarily on the visual possibilities of his materials. A ubiquitous material in the post-war era, he often said that automotive metal was accessible and easy to manipulate, like marble was in the hands of Italian sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The preexisting paint and surfaces of salvaged metal emphasised the sculptural process itself, revealing each work as a dynamic assembly whose layered construction recorded the artist’s decisions and gestures.
Chamberlain explored how colour, weight, and balance interact to explore the energy of Abstract Expressionism and the premanufactured components of Pop Art and Minimalism. Much like the paintings of his contemporaries Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, which visibly retain the gestures and movements involved in their creation, Chamberlain’s sculptures foreground the act of making itself, revealing how form emerges through process. By liberating his medium from its traditional anthropomorphism and preconceived construction, Chamberlain was able to make sculpture as free as painting.
John Chamberlain has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Europe. His works have been shown in exhibitions in major institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Menil Collection, Houston, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among many more. Today, his works can be found in a number of museums and public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Menil Collection, Houston; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C; The Art Institute of Chicago; Tate, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, among many others.