John Chamberlain
ChevyMetal
Chamberlain belongs to that generation of artists who - by using everyday materials - has revised traditional perceptions of what is art, and has thus dismantled the boundaries, which clearly separated everyday man from the world of art. He is considered to be a leading representative and creator of Pop Art, sometimes his works are also associated with Nouveau Réalisme.
In 1957, Chamberlain first started making sculptures using scrap car metal and immediately gained worldwide fame and recognition. The materials he used - be it sheet metal, urethane foam or aluminium foil - were squeezed, coiled, folded, and compressed using a car crusher. With his works of art the artist has given this anonymous, industrial material a living form. Yet at the same time Chamberlain’s works are always non-referential - pictorial constructions that straddle sculpture and painting - objects that the sculptor has arrived at through an open-ended process of juxtaposing one object with another. His approach is consciously unpredictable and unplanable: the act of folding and squeezing always results in a unique, impossible to replicate object. For each sculpture Chamberlain has to discover - from anew - how these disparate forms fit together. His sculptures are static, dormant shapes that constantly appear to be on the brink of transforming themselves into new constellations. They embody force and violence in which nothing is stable and secure.
