John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain’s dynamic objects, often made of crushed car parts in exuberant palettes, merge the gestural spontaneity of Abstract Expressionism with the consumerist vernacular of Pop art. During the late 1960s, Chamberlain moved away from his signature car-part works to experiment with more pliable materials, such as urethane foam, finding new expressions and forms in the process. This exhibition brings together a range of works culled from Dia’s collection that illustrate this exploratory period, in addition to his iconic steel sculptures and later examples where Chamberlain sprayed color over the found metals and increased a sculpture’s size to an architectural effect.

John Chamberlain is curated by Min Sun Jeon, assistant curator.

Best known for his crushed-car-part sculptures in exuberant palettes, John Chamberlain created dynamic works that merge the gestural spontaneity of Abstract Expressionism with the consumerist vernacular of Pop art. Beginning in 1967, a decade after making his first sculpture from car parts, Chamberlain spent seven years experimenting with more pliable materials—aluminum foil, plexiglass, paper bags, and urethane foam—in search of new forms and expressions. Much as he had unleashed the potential latent in metals, Chamberlain found in these everyday materials endless sculptural possibilities. As he explained, “I like a lot of different materials … I work with the material as opposed to enforcing some kind of will upon it.” While the auto parts required machines for their compression and torquing, his newfound media yielded easily to his hands, allowing greater immediacy, intuition, and chance, and subsequently leading to the maturation of his metal works.

During his exploratory period, Chamberlain embraced the sponge-like foam for its particular directness of expression as well as its resiliency, porosity, and tactility. Reflecting on these works, he remarked, “I wanted to do a sculpture that was quick, in a different material from what I’d used before, and instant sculpture was the result.” Chamberlain cut, squeezed, and tied the foam with cords, creating an interplay of sharply gouged edges and flowing contours, as seen in Lop Nor and Soopad (both 1967) that bear traces of cinches at varying angles and degrees of tension. Meanwhile, works from the Stuffed Dog series (1967–70) feature more rounded, inward-curling forms, and show Chamberlain’s increasing experimentation with color dripped, sprayed, or splashed. Realized in parallel, the galvanized-steel sculptures share formal and procedural affinities with the foam works, for example Norma Jean Risen (1967/84) where Chamberlain used a compactor machine to crush and contort an open metal box, inspired by the shape of a crumpled cigarette pack. Here, rather than creating a composite from discrete fragments, the artist folded a single object onto itself, preserving a sense of continuity and self-containment.