JOHN CHAMBERLAIN

John Chamberlain (b. 1927, Rochester, Indiana; d. 2011, New York City) is an American artist known for creating large-scale assemblages from discarded industrial detritus. Chamberlain created works by spraying, stenciling, dribbling, and airbrushing layers of brilliant colour onto steel. His early work is considered to be quintessentially American, uniting sweet rose and cerulean pastel enamels with Detroit’s hard industrial steel. In the early 1950s Chamberlain began to make flat, welded sculptures influenced by the work of David Smith. The energy, force and spontaneity of his later works increasingly suggested the influence of the Abstract Expressionists, chiefly artists Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning. His choice of material and blurring of boundaries between sculpture and painting challenged traditional notions of sculpture, and defined a significant shift in its modern history. His work uniquely reconciled Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Pop art, fusing references to consumerism with standardised, manufactured products. During the 1960s, Chamberlain executed a series of geometric paintings with sprayed automobile paint and tied urethane foam sculptures before incorporating melted Plexiglas into his crushed metal sculptures in the 1970s. Chamberlain also worked with photography and video, his film The Secret Life of Hernanda Cortez, 1968, becoming a cult classic.