He spent his childhood in New Mexico. He studied mathematics and chemistry at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York State from 1941 to 1948. In the meantime until 1946 he stayed in Europe during his military service. In 1944 and 1945 he took part in the liberation of Kassel as an intelligence officer. After an apprenticeship as a furniture maker, Artschwager studied art for two years at the Amedée Ozenfant Studio School in New York from 1950 onwards. In the period that followed, he made furniture or furniture-like objects, especially until 1962, which always showed sculptural elements.

His work "Portrait 1" from 1962 is made up of painterly and sculptural elements: The artist painted a portrait of a man in grisaille tones on a cube, which looks like a black and white photo. In 1963 he made the furniture work Claes Oldenburg's Bedroom Ensemble, which can be seen in the Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art. In 1965 he showed his works in his first exhibition at Leo Castelli's gallery in New York. In the following two years he took part in several exhibitions in the USA. In Germany, Artschwager exhibited at ducumenta 4, documenta 5, documenta 7, documenta 8 and documenta 9 in Kassel between 1968 and 1992, among others.

Artschwager's painting and sculpture works in the 1960s and 1970s, which he increasingly devoted himself to producing from 1962 onwards, could not be clearly assigned to styles; Officially they belong to pop and minimal art as well as conceptual art. In his early pictures the artist often used motifs that came from real estate advertisements. He then turned to banal motifs, which he greatly enlarged. The grisaille technique makes them look like enlarged photos that have also been rasterized. The painting work was done on Celotex, a fiberboard made from sugar cane residues mixed with mineral fibers. The selected background is characterized by a rough surface that suits Artschwager's depiction technique.

It approaches the style of American hyper-realism, which emphasizes material and structure and completely dispenses with artistic subjectivity. More recently, Artschwager was awarded the Wolfgang Hahn Prize of the Society for Modern Art at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 2005 and the Roswitha Haftmann Prize in Zurich in 2007. The artist lives and works in Upstate New York.

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Richard Artschwager

Art Department

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