David Nolan New York
527 West 29th Street
New York, NY 10001
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The closer you get, the more unfamiliar it looks: Richard Artschwager has a well-developed facility for nudging the ordinary into the shadowy realm of the phantom. The subject can be called prosaic, but the subtext of Artschwager's work has always been about a certain perceptual chemistry that transforms familiar forms of matter (like tables, chairs, interiors, or people) into a stage kind of object-hood that is not so easy to describe. As one confounded writer confessed in 1977 (no less); "…most curiously, instead of becoming more clear about what the chair looks like, one becomes less clear about it. It is surely possible to make a mental construct but the feeling grows that the mental construct has nothing to do with the chair itself."
This retrospective selection of drawings encompasses 40 years of Richard Artschwager's eclecticism, and offers a solid vantage point from which to contemplate his unique position in contemporary art.