NANCY RUBINS vs. JOHN CHAMBERLAIN
FOUND OBJECTS TWISTED & DESIGNED INTO BEAUTIFUL FORM : kindred spirits. Rubin blends mostly intact forms, seldom changing their original structure creating massive sculptural fragments roped together. In contrast to Chamberlain, an early abstract pioneer from the 60's alongside artists like Duchamp, Tinguely and Rauschenberg, thrusts together bent and crushed car metals creating condensed intimate works. Both are equally as powerful^^^^
For, J.D.
FOUND OBJECTS TWISTED & DESIGNED INTO BEAUTIFUL FORM : kindred spirits. Rubin blends mostly intact forms, seldom changing their original structure creating massive sculptural fragments roped together. In contrast to Chamberlain, an early abstract pioneer from the 60's alongside artists like Duchamp, Tinguely and Rauschenberg, thrusts together bent and crushed car metals creating condensed intimate works. Both are equally as powerful^^^^
For, J.D.
NANCY RUBINS
sculptor
b. 1952, Naples, Texas
b. 1952, Naples, Texas
ABOUT
NANCY RUBINS
Nancy Rubins was born in Naples, Texas, raised in Tullahoma, Tennessee, and studied at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, Baltimore (BFA, 1974) and the University of California, Davis (MFA, 1976). She currently lives and works in Topanga Canyon, California. Her work is part of numerous public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; and FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon, France. Her solo museum exhibitions include those hosted by Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (1994); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1995); ARTPACE, San Antonio (1997); Miami Art Museum (1999); Fonds regional d'art contemporain de Bourgogne, France (2005); SculptureCenter, Long Island City, New York (2006); Lincoln Center, New York (2006); and Navy Pier, Chicago (2013). Rubins’ large scale, outdoor sculptures are on permanent display at institutions throughout the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, and l’Université Paris Diderot, Paris.
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Nancy Rubins transforms industrial, manufactured objects—such as mattresses, appliances, boats—into the building blocks of her physically commanding monumental sculptures. Acting as an intermediary between the past and future states of her chosen materials, Rubins hones the formal, rather than the functional qualities of the discrete components that make up a single, cohesive sculpture. The recent Monochrome series, for example, features numerous and varied canoes and rowboats, arranged around a large steal armature, like so many leaves on the limb of a tree. Brimming with the entropic energies of a force of nature, her arrangements evoke a precarious equilibrium of objects in space, citing both the traditions of modernist American monumental sculpture as well as bricolage, which emphasize the aesthetic possibilities of quotidian objects.
special thanks to the Guggenheim Museum
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JOHN CHAMBERLAIN
sculptor
sculptor
b. 1927, Rochester, Indiana; d. 2011, New York
ABOUT
JOHN CHAMBERLAIN
Chamberlain was born in 1927 in Rochester, Indiana. He grew up in Chicago and, after serving in the navy from 1943 to 1946, attended the Art Institute of Chicago from 1950 to 1952. At that time, he began making welded steel sculptures influenced by the work of David Smith. In 1955 and 1956, Chamberlain studied and taught sculpture at Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina, where most of his friends were poets, including Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson. By 1958, he began to incorporate scrap metal from cars in his work, and from 1959 on he concentrated on sculpture built entirely of crushed automobile parts welded together. Chamberlain's first major solo show was presented at the Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, in 1960. Chamberlain's work achieved critical acclaim in the early 1960s, gaining him a reputation as a three-dimensional Abstract Expressionist. His sculpture was included in The Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1961, the same year he participated in the São Paulo Biennial. From 1962, Chamberlain showed frequently at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, and in 1964 his work was exhibited at the Venice Biennale. While he continued to make sculpture from auto parts, Chamberlain also experimented with other materials. From 1963 to 1965, he made geometric paintings with sprayed automobile paint. In 1966, the same year he received the first of two fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, he began a series of sculptures with urethane foam, which he rolled, folded, cut, and tied. He then applied methods of crushing and compression to galvanized steel and paper bags. These were followed in 1970 by sculptures of heat-crumpled Plexiglas. During this period he also made the film The Secret Life of Hernando Cortez (1968), starring Andy Warhol's superstars Taylor Mead and Ultra Violet. Chamberlain's work was presented in a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1971. Small examples of his newest engagement with aluminum foil were exhibited for the first time.
In the last decade of his life, the artist expanded his oeuvre by undertaking a new medium: large-format photographs printed on canvas, altered with digital visual effects, cut into regular vertical segments, and collaged to create new compositions. In 2007, he began to create a new body of work recasting his miniature foil sculptures from the mid-1980s in monumental scale. He also acquired a cache of vintage automobiles, from which he culled the materials for his last sculptures—confident and majestic in their imposing dimensions, displaying the maturation of his earliest sculptural explorations of abstraction, stance, and fit. Chamberlain died on December 21, 2011, in New York.
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you just saw the brilliant works of :
NANCY RUBENS & JOHN CHAMBERLAIN
