Beschreibung:

John Chamberlain Gris Gris Gumbo Ya Ya 1990 painted and chromium plated steel 66 1/8 x 73 x 61 in. (168 x 185.4 x 155 cm.)
Provenance Galerie Karsten Greve, Cologne Exhibited Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, John Chamberlain Current Work and Fond Memories: Sculptures and Photographs 1967-1995, May 11 – June 30, 1996, then traveled to Wolfsburg, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (September 7 – November 17, 1996) Literature R. Fuchs, J. Yau, D. Judd, M. Bloem, John Chamberlain Current Works and Fond Memories, Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1996, p. 50 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay “Kline gave me the structure, de Kooning gave me the color.” JOHN CHAMBERLAIN 1990 John Chamberlain is indisputably the most important sculptor of the Abstract Expressionist movement. His iconic sculptures are composed of crushed automobile parts, which fuse the gestural spontaneity of Abstract Expressionism with the love for color of Pop Art and the modularity of Minimalism. Throughout his career, Chamberlain had worked with a broad range of materials, some as pliant as foam rubber and as ephemeral as brown paper bags. All the same, he always returned to his fervor of crushing, twisting and bending richly colored parts of metal. These large sculptures invite the viewer to fully engage in the artwork by following the complex topography of the three-dimensional surface, continually exploring the changing and revolving multiplicities of volume and color. After moving to New York from Chicago in 1956, Chamberlain became close friends with Abstract Expressionist painters he met at the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village. Like other artists of his generation, such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns his work immobilizes the performative gestures with vernacular constructions of collage. Chamberlain has been celebrated as having reintroduced color to sculpture after Modernists had sternly denied it in favor of a focus on form. Even though his metal assemblages are frequently read as a chaotic riff on Duchamp’s ready-mades, the character of paintings by Franz Kline and especially Willem de Kooning are viscerally present throughout his oeuvre. Yet Chamberlain’s sculptures also embody the removal of the referential, and the structured use of color and volume in space; all of which are pioneering themes that Donald Judd and his compatriots would further explore in Minimalism. Gris Gris Gumbo Ya Ya, 1990, is a magnificent example of Chamberlain’s artistic impact, dominated by the unique use of color and the intense compression of the large sculpture. The work was given the Nickname the Flower by its previous owner because of the way the sculpture resembles the shape of a fresh bouquet of flowers with vibrant spring colors. The wonderful color palette of Gris Gris Gumbo Ya Ya, 1990, ranges from deep shades of blues and greens, to lighter pastel turquoises and vibrant reds, violets, yellows and candy pinks. Many of the sheets have multiple colors spraypainted or dripped on them in an Expressionist manner; a gesture that points back to his early years working alongside the AbEx group in New York City. Much like an abstract painter, Chamberlain rejected analogies between his work and real life such as the comparison to violent car crashes. He wanted the audience to view his work without preconceived ideas of the materials’ past. Chamberlain was interested in letting the raw beauty of pre-fabricated parts dictate the form and the color of his sculptures. As he describes the process: “One day something—some one thing—pops out at you, and you pick it up, and you take it over, and you put it somewhere else, and it fits, it’s just the right thing at the right moment.” (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, John Chamberlain Choices, Press Release). The final configuration of the sculpture was unknown to him until he had added the last piece to the puzzle. The fact that most of the sculptures are self-supporting and only have spot welding points means that the individual parts don’t move when transported; a puzzle of permanence. This procedure of piling found objects follows the preconceptions of a readymade and