ART CITIES:Paris-John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain, Barbrhu, 1989, Photography, Ed. 3/9, 50,8 x 61 cm, © John Chamberlain, Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve Köln/Paris/St MoritzJohn Chamberlain came to fame by creating exuberant and stately forms, using the crumpled car parts’ colors to delineate the irregularity of metal. Over the course of his long career, Chamberlain experimented with plastic, industrial foam, photography and filmmaking but his metal sculpture defines his practice. He found a way to balance the urban detritus of discarded metal waste into massive yet buoyant celebrations of volume and color.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Karsten Greve Archive

The exhibition “Photographs” at Galerie Karsten Greve in Paris is devoted to the photographic oeuvre of John Chamberlain. John Chamberlain studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and after at the Black Mountain College between 1955-56 and then moved to New York where he joined in with the Abstract Expressionist painters at their Cedar Tavern hang out and spoke of the influence he drew from the work of Franz Kline and colors of Willem de Kooning. By 1958, he began to incorporate scrap metal from cars in his work, and from 1959 on he concentrated on sculpture built entirely of crushed automobile parts welded together. Chamberlain’s first major solo exhibition was presented in 1960 at the Martha Jackson Gallery. Chamberlain’s work achieved critical acclaim in the early ‘60s, gaining him a reputation as a three-dimensional Abstract Expressionist. His sculpture was included in the exhibition “The Art of Assemblage” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1961, the same year he participated in the São Paulo Biennial. John Chamberlain experimented over the course of his career with a wide variety of media, from painting and drawing to monotyping, film, and above all photography. From 1977 on, Chamberlain pursued photography with a panoramic Widelux camera, given to him by Larry Bell. His first photography exhibition was in 1979 in New York. The Widelux is a fully mechanical swing-lens panoramic camera first developed in Japan in 1958, instead of a shutter, the camera has a slit that exposes the film as the lens pivots on a horizontal arc. The last Widelux model F8 ended production in 2000. When used with a tripod, as was customary, the Widelux produced clear, balanced compositions. John Chamberlain challenged the camera’s typical use when he decided to pivot and swing it while taking the shot. The resulting photographs revealed the traces of controlled, intuitive improvisation, rooted in the idea of movement that deforms and blends objects into a flux of colours. He used the errors produced by the swing of the camera to strip things of their immobile material reality and project them into a dimension in which time is materialised by fluidly flowing colours. The exhibition presents, among others, a series of photographs, the artist captured in Paris in the late ‘80s. These were taken while walking in the street, near the Eiffel Tower, while dinning in local brasseries or in the most popular restaurants such as Laperouse.

Info: Galerie Karsten Greve, 5 rue Debelleyme, Paris, Duration: 11/3-29/4/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.galerie-karsten-greve.com

John Chamberlain, Downtown, 1989, Photography, Ed. 4/9, 50,8 x 61 cm, © John Chamberlain, Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve Köln/Paris/St Moritz
John Chamberlain, Downtown, 1989, Photography, Ed. 4/9, 50,8 x 61 cm, © John Chamberlain, Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve Köln/Paris/St Moritz

 

 

John Chamberlain, Studio Lite IV, 1989, Photography, Ed. 4/9, 50,8 x 61 cm, © John Chamberlain, Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve Köln/Paris/St Moritz
John Chamberlain, Studio Lite IV, 1989, Photography, Ed. 4/9, 50,8 x 61 cm, © John Chamberlain, Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve Köln/Paris/St Moritz

 

 

John Chamberlain, Studio Lite XV, 1990, Photography, Ed. 6/9, 50,8 x 61 cm, © John Chamberlain, Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve Köln/Paris/St Moritz
John Chamberlain, Studio Lite XV, 1990, Photography, Ed. 6/9, 50,8 x 61 cm, © John Chamberlain, Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve Köln/Paris/St Moritz

 

 

John Chamberlain, Untitled, 1995, Photography, Ed. 3/9, 50,8 x 61 cm, © John Chamberlain, Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve Köln/Paris/St Moritz
John Chamberlain, Untitled, 1995, Photography, Ed. 3/9, 50,8 x 61 cm, © John Chamberlain, Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve Köln/Paris/St Moritz