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Born in Washington, D.C. in 1923, Richard Artschwager was an American artist whose paintings and sculptures challenged the boundaries between image and object. Moving between Pop Art, Minimalism and Conceptual Art, he transformed familiar furnishings, domestic interiors and architectural forms into works that unsettle perception. His distinctive use of industrial materials, particularly Formica and Celotex, became central to a practice that questioned how objects are represented and experienced.

Artschwager grew up in New Mexico and studied chemistry and mathematics at Cornell University, graduating with a degree in physics in 1948 after serving in the US Army during World War II. Encouraged by his first wife, Elfriede Wejmelka, he pursued art in New York, studying under the French painter Amédée Ozenfant. To support his family, he began designing and manufacturing furniture in 1953, which developed his technical expertise in woodworking and proved formative to his later sculptures.

By the early 1960s, the artist was adapting tables, chairs and other utilitarian forms into sculptures that occupied an ambiguous position between functional design and fine art. In Table with Chair (1963–64), furniture becomes both a recognisable object and a study of representation. He also produced paintings of interiors and architectural spaces, often rendered in grey tones on Celotex, whose coarse surface introduced a tactile dimension to the image. His Interior with Sideboard I (1974) was sold for US$1,272,000 at Christie’s New York in 2007. In 1967, Artschwager introduced his blps — black, lozenge-shaped forms placed in unexpected locations to draw attention to overlooked spaces.

The artist held his first solo exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York in 1965, beginning a longstanding association with the influential dealer. His work was subsequently presented in major exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, which organised retrospectives in 1988 and 2012. His works are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris. Artschwager died in Albany, New York, in 2013, aged 89.