Artists

Richard Artschwager


b. 1923, Washington D.C.

Selected Press

Art in America- May 2013

Artschwagerian
by Alexi Worth

RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER, who died Feb. 9, changed my life. But the change had nothing to do with his sculptures or paintings, nor with meeting the man himself-though he was an interesting sideways talker, full of candid answers to questions I hadn't asked. What did the trick was his drawings, a big stack of them, which the art dealer David Nolan placed on a table for me one day in the spring of 2008. "You Might," he suggested lightly, "want to have a look at these."

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New York Magazine- August 2012

Artschwager Does More With Less
by Rachel Wolff

At 88, with a Whitney retrospective ahead, what is the last great minimalist doing? Simplifying his own life.

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The Wall Street Journal- November 2011

Richard Artschwager
By PETER PLAGENS

Richard Artschwager (b. 1923) is one of the last living American artists to have served in World War II. He studied with pioneer modernist Amédée Ozenfant in Paris. All through this oddball grizzled veteran's body of work, varied in form but consistent in tone, he's remained against the grain. It's a lot easier to say you like Mr. Artschwager's grudgingly figurative, defiantly homely paintings and sculptures than it is to actually do so. (He paints a plank of wood with a cartoonish wood grain, for instance.) Liking them, however, has its rewards—such as prying open your jaws of taste just a little bit further than you're used to.

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The New York Times- November 2011

Richard Artschwager
By Roberta Smith

In the last several years Richard Artschwager’s art seems to have lost some of its usual cool, and this is a good thing. Colors have warmed and a degree of direct observation has softened the intense artifice, grounded in an idiosyncratic fusion of Pop Art and Minimalism, that is so basic to the wide-ranging Artschwager brand.

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CityArts- October 2011

Texture As Sculpture
By Valerie Gladstone

When artists enjoy long lives, their fans reap tremendous advantages. This thought came to mind when looking over Richard Artschwager’s new works at David Nolan Gallery. Born in 1923, he has never fit into any category for very long, passing through styles that superficially resembled pop, minimal and conceptual, all the while confounding critics who have tried to pigeonhole him.

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Art in America- February 2009

Richard Artschwager at David Nolan Gallery
by Gregory Galligan

This show of Richard Artschwager's drawings and sculpture, "Objects as Images of Objects: 1966-2008," made it quite clear that the artist is nobody's mimic. Starting in the late 1960's, Artschwager has been referred to as a Minimalist, a Conceptualist, a borrower of Pop, and more recently, a forefather of Neo-Geo. But as demonstrated here, Artschwager (who is now in his mid-80's) continues to produce original and sophisticated work that is in the moment as well as visually and conceptually compelling.

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The Art Newspaper- November 2008

Richard Artschwager at David Nolan Gallery

The inaugural exhibition at the new David Nolan Gallery features a 40-year retrospective of drawings and sculpture by the American artist, Richard Artschwager. His most recent work, shown for the first time, is n the form of a permanent architectural facade painted in the artist's signature cadmium yellow. The work was created in collaboration with Markus Dochantschi of studioMDA.

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The New Yorker- November 2008

Richard Artschwager at David Nolan Gallery

The octogenerian artist, who also designed the gallery's bright yellow facade, claims to have put drawing on the back burner in the nineteen-sixties to focus on sculpture. Bus, as the works on paper here prove, he never lost his passion for working in two dimensions. Some of the drawings use charcoal and pencil to solve sculptural problems of space, form, and light; others experiment with techniques of rubbing and cutting.

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The New York Times- May 2006

Richard Artschwager: Interactions
by Grace Glueck

A sly but unassuming presence on the New York scene for nearly 50 years, Richard Artschwager wields his talents in a humorously deadpan way that smacks more than faintly of nonchalance. A painter, sculptor, photographer and carpenter, he has, over the years, left very few subjects undrawn, unpainted or unwrought.

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Art in America- April 2004

Richard Artschwager at Nolan/Eckman and Anthony Grant
by Eleanor Heartney

When it first appear on the art scene in the early 1960's, Richard Artschwager's work seemed situated somewhere between Pop and Minimalism. His boxy sculptures celebrated a reductive geometry while retaining a reference to everyday objects such as chairs, tables and framed pictures. His paintings, linear representations of banal scenes, combined a Pop-style mockery of pictorial illusion and a Minimalist reliance on industrial materials (his favored support was Celotex, a textured ground created from sugarcane pressed over panels).

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The New York Times- June 2000

Richard Artschwager: Drawings in Transit, 1960-2000
by Grace Glueck

Richard Artschwager, an artist turned carpenter for a while, then an artist again, makes drawings of somethings, anythings and nothings. And sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. It really does matter, because whatever he zeroes in on makes you look.

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The New York Times- November 1997

Richard Artschwager and Joe Zucker
by Ken Johnson

Two of the most intriguing minds in contemporary art are represented here in separate, small shows. Richard Artschwager presents nine new charcoal drawings. In several, a thin schematic line and pale shading describe rooms in each of which precisely six items are distributed. In a surrealistically angled corner, for example, a rug, a door, a window, a picture frame, a table and a towel are all attached to the walls as those in an art gallery.

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