John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain’s sculptures transformed the mundane into the monumental, twisting scrap metal, automobile parts and other industrial materials into abstract intersecting forms and contours. A key figure in the Abstract Expressionist movement, Chamberlain’s work explored themes of capitalism, the automobile industry and the waste resulting from mass consumption.

Chamberlain was born in 1927 in Rochester, Indiana. He had discovered a talent for working with volume even before he began his studies as an artist. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he intermittently worked as a hairdresser, and has acknowledged that he had an exceptional talent for constructing the cantilevered bouffant hairstyles for women that were in fashion at the time.

Soon after, he discovered art and followed a path of artistic training that would lead him briefly to the Art Institute of Chicago and then the avant-garde bastion Black Mountain College. There, he became particularly engaged in poetry, led by experimental poets such as Charles Olson, Robert Duncan and Robert Creely. He was drawn to their boundary-pushing approach to language, which would later influence his approach to the materials of sculpture as well as the way he titled his pieces, often incorporating enigmatic names and word play to complicate how the viewer perceived his work.

In 1956 Chamberlain moved to New York, joining the raucous scene at the Cedar Bar, where Abstract Expressionists often congregated to discuss and debate. While most members of the scene were looking to redefine the traditional notions of painting, Chamberlain forged his own path in sculpture. Chamberlain has admitted that the power of Franz Kline and the colour of Willem de Kooning’s painting had an important effect on him.

During that period, Chamberlain began experimenting with scrap metal, specifically discarded automobile parts. His breakthrough came with sculptures that welded and compressed these materials into vibrant, abstract forms. These works shared with Abstract Expressionism a powerful sense of spontaneity and traces of process in its crumpled, rusted and scraped steel. Improvisation was essential in Chamberlain’s adoption of auto parts as sculptural medium.

In 1966 Chamberlain began a series of sculptures made of rolled, folded and tied urethane foam, before returning to his primary material of metal. Chamberlain also explored other artistic mediums, including painting and filmmaking. His paintings, though less known than his sculptures, exhibited a similar energy and abstraction, using bold colours and gestural strokes to convey a sense of dynamism. In filmmaking, Chamberlain’s works often reflected his sculptural practices, focusing on texture, form, and the interplay of light and shadow.

Chamberlain’s work has been exhibited worldwide and included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and more. John Chamberlain died in 2011, in New York.