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Lot Essay
Immediately recognizable as a John Chamberlain sculpture, Alors Pimpette is delightful both in the artist’s penchant for choosing quirky and amusing titles and, of course, for his signature ability to fashion an art object of striking and surprising elegance from that quintessential castoff material of 20th century industrial society, discarded automotive parts, that in Chamberlain’s hands assumed forms remarkably voluptuous and graceful, as they do here.
The present work is a sculpture that is deceptively simple appearing, but its polychromatic cuts and folds are compositionally complex, kinetic and improvisational, dynamic yet restrained. Alors Pimpette is one of a number of striking, strongly vertical sculptures that Chamberlain created in the decade of the 1980s. Built up from layers of crushed metal sheets compressed and welded into a form compelling in its upward-reaching expression, the free-standing work is a captivating example of abstraction in sculpture.
General audiences, critics and art historians alike have taken note of Chamberlain’s exceptional skill for working with color, evident in his handling of the raw materials making up the current work, with its splashes of orange, red, green and blue, the dark-hued glistening shine of the colors set in contrast with flashes of brighter silver chrome elements. It is hard to overstate the impact of color in Chamberlain’s sculpture, as it radically revised an earlier 20th Century sculptural tradition that had by and large avoided color prior to Chamberlain’s arrival. Starting early in his career he helped to encourage the bold use of color in sculpture, where before it had been seen as the preserve of painters.
“What set (Chamberlain) apart immediately when he first showed his work…was the fact that it included color (which) astounded everybody. ...that ability to take these very disparate colors found in automobiles, and to combine them in a way that creates a rather colorful palette.” (S. Davidson, Transcript of John Chamberlain: Choices Exhibition Video, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, February 24-May 13, 2012). By the late 1980s, when the present work was created, Chamberlain had been exploring the nuances of found and applied color in his sculptural practice for three decades, perfecting the practice in late career pieces such as the present example.
The close, seamless way that Chamberlain constructed the present work by fitting rough, uneven individual pieces of scrap metal together shows what exceptional skill he had in building an organic, harmonious sculptural piece out of what had previously been simply an unrelated miscellany of raw materials. The artist handled the individual elements of hard metal so skillfully that his materials take on the, drape, look and feel of soft folds of fabric. The shapes display the forces of bending, crushing, twisting, and crumpling, actions that were integral to Chamberlain’s understanding of his medium and that were a defining feature of his work. He sought expressive possibilities through the diverse ways that his materials yielded to or resisted the forces of compression. The strategy of fit and compression that John Chamberlain used so skillfully to transform his materials of choice into a fully realized piece is on full display in the present work. Chamberlain would speak of achieving the right fit for the individual parts so that they joined in exactly the right way, resulting in a harmonious sculpture.
One of the trailblazing artists to emerge from the 1960s, inspired by the achievements of movements as diverse as Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism, Chamberlain introduced innovative new materials for making sculpture, and new ways of presenting his work, both in indoor and outdoor settings. An extraordinary character and larger than life figure, he was exceptional, a fascinating set of contradictions, even among the stellar artist peers of his generation: “(h)e was a trained hairdresser who got into drunken street fights, an East Coaster whose work seemed steeped in California car culture, a large-scale sculptor who periodically turned out twee tabletop constructions.” (K. Rosenberg, “Beyond the Junkyard: ‘John Chamberlain: Choices’ at Guggenheim Museum,” The New York Times, February 23, 2012).
As a proponent of the medium of Assemblage Art, he was included in the influential “Art of Assemblage” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1961. He helped to introduce techniques of collage to the three-dimensional medium of sculpture, using the method to recast discarded pieces and in so doing achieve in his work a genuine poise and beauty. Consistent with the Assemblage aesthetic with which he was identified, his real interest was in re-using and ultimately transforming everyday materials through his art practice and he continued to refine this approach over a career that spanned several decades and included major lifetime retrospectives at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Chamberlain made the daring decision to work with the materials of his own era, thinking of automotive parts and other industrials materials as simply a medium that was readily available for him to use, as sculptors of previous eras thought of bronze or marble.
The present work is a sculpture that is deceptively simple appearing, but its polychromatic cuts and folds are compositionally complex, kinetic and improvisational, dynamic yet restrained. Alors Pimpette is one of a number of striking, strongly vertical sculptures that Chamberlain created in the decade of the 1980s. Built up from layers of crushed metal sheets compressed and welded into a form compelling in its upward-reaching expression, the free-standing work is a captivating example of abstraction in sculpture.
General audiences, critics and art historians alike have taken note of Chamberlain’s exceptional skill for working with color, evident in his handling of the raw materials making up the current work, with its splashes of orange, red, green and blue, the dark-hued glistening shine of the colors set in contrast with flashes of brighter silver chrome elements. It is hard to overstate the impact of color in Chamberlain’s sculpture, as it radically revised an earlier 20th Century sculptural tradition that had by and large avoided color prior to Chamberlain’s arrival. Starting early in his career he helped to encourage the bold use of color in sculpture, where before it had been seen as the preserve of painters.
“What set (Chamberlain) apart immediately when he first showed his work…was the fact that it included color (which) astounded everybody. ...that ability to take these very disparate colors found in automobiles, and to combine them in a way that creates a rather colorful palette.” (S. Davidson, Transcript of John Chamberlain: Choices Exhibition Video, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, February 24-May 13, 2012). By the late 1980s, when the present work was created, Chamberlain had been exploring the nuances of found and applied color in his sculptural practice for three decades, perfecting the practice in late career pieces such as the present example.
The close, seamless way that Chamberlain constructed the present work by fitting rough, uneven individual pieces of scrap metal together shows what exceptional skill he had in building an organic, harmonious sculptural piece out of what had previously been simply an unrelated miscellany of raw materials. The artist handled the individual elements of hard metal so skillfully that his materials take on the, drape, look and feel of soft folds of fabric. The shapes display the forces of bending, crushing, twisting, and crumpling, actions that were integral to Chamberlain’s understanding of his medium and that were a defining feature of his work. He sought expressive possibilities through the diverse ways that his materials yielded to or resisted the forces of compression. The strategy of fit and compression that John Chamberlain used so skillfully to transform his materials of choice into a fully realized piece is on full display in the present work. Chamberlain would speak of achieving the right fit for the individual parts so that they joined in exactly the right way, resulting in a harmonious sculpture.
One of the trailblazing artists to emerge from the 1960s, inspired by the achievements of movements as diverse as Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism, Chamberlain introduced innovative new materials for making sculpture, and new ways of presenting his work, both in indoor and outdoor settings. An extraordinary character and larger than life figure, he was exceptional, a fascinating set of contradictions, even among the stellar artist peers of his generation: “(h)e was a trained hairdresser who got into drunken street fights, an East Coaster whose work seemed steeped in California car culture, a large-scale sculptor who periodically turned out twee tabletop constructions.” (K. Rosenberg, “Beyond the Junkyard: ‘John Chamberlain: Choices’ at Guggenheim Museum,” The New York Times, February 23, 2012).
As a proponent of the medium of Assemblage Art, he was included in the influential “Art of Assemblage” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1961. He helped to introduce techniques of collage to the three-dimensional medium of sculpture, using the method to recast discarded pieces and in so doing achieve in his work a genuine poise and beauty. Consistent with the Assemblage aesthetic with which he was identified, his real interest was in re-using and ultimately transforming everyday materials through his art practice and he continued to refine this approach over a career that spanned several decades and included major lifetime retrospectives at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Chamberlain made the daring decision to work with the materials of his own era, thinking of automotive parts and other industrials materials as simply a medium that was readily available for him to use, as sculptors of previous eras thought of bronze or marble.