NEW YORK, NY.- The Pace Gallery presents an exhibition of sculptures by John Chamberlain from 1982 to 2008, on view from April 15 through June 11, 2011. Chamberlain has been the subject of thirteen solo exhibitions at The Pace Gallery since 1963, as well as the seminal exhibition De Kooning and Chamberlain: Influence and Transformation, which explored the affinities between the muscular and gestural styles of the two Abstract Expressionists working across generations and mediums.
Critics, curators, and artists including Donald Judd, Irving Sandler, Klaus Kertess, Henry Geldhalzer, Bernice Rose, Brian ODoherty, and Julie Sylvester have contributed essays and interviews with Chamberlain for exhibition catalogues published by the gallery, excerpts of which will serve as wall text for key works in the exhibition, contextualizing the evolution of Chamberlains work over three decades.
Given the complexity of Chamberlains dialectics and the openness of his improvisational process, the diversity of his sculptures comes as no surprise. What distinguishes them all is their originality, inventiveness, and masterliness or, as Chamberlain put it, its all in the fit. Irving Sandler, 1991
John Chamberlain (b. 1927, Rochester, IN) studied at The Art Institute of Chicago and Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the 1950s. In addition to working with steel, the medium for which he is best known, Chamberlain made films in the late 1960s and has employed other media including foam, foil, ink on canvas, oil, photography, and Plexiglas. Exhibited throughout the United States and Europe,
Chamberlain has been twice awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1966 and 1977) and in 1990 was elected a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, New York. Some years following his residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, Chamberlain received the schools 1993 Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture. That same year, he was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture from the International Sculpture Center, Washington, D.C. In 1997, Chamberlain was named a recipient of The National Arts Club Artists Award, New York, and in 1999, he received the Distinction in Sculpture Honor from the Sculpture Center, New York. In 2007, Guild Hall Academy of the Fine Arts named Chamberlain the Visual Arts Honoree for the 22nd Annual Lifetime Achievement Award.