NYAB Event - Richard Artschwager, Georg Herold, and Adam McEwen “About Wood”

Richard Artschwager, Georg Herold, and Adam McEwen “About Wood”

David Nolan Gallery

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David Nolan Gallery presents “About Wood,” featuring three sculptural works by Richard Artschwager, Georg Herold, and Adam McEwen in the gallery’s mezzanine project room.

All three artists in this exhibition exploit the non-referential and humble nature of wood. Throughout the 20th century, it has been vaunted for its basic function as well as its versatility as a surface/material upon which we project meaning.

Richard Artschwager was a furniture maker before he became an artist in the 1950’s, using wood (and its facsimile, Formica) as one of his materials of choice. In this exhibition, we will feature Artschwager’s Chair (1965-2000), where photographs of a wooden chair are superimposed on a chair-shaped sculpture.

In the hands of Artschwager, an object becomes an image of the object. In a similar vein, Adam McEwen has created Untitled (2012), a carbon graphite sculpture fabricated in the image of a round piece of wooden chipboard. McEwen has used graphite in the past to create an American Express credit card, a drinking fountain, and an air conditioner. These mundane objects of contemporary life are faithfully replicated, nodding to the formal and procedural strategies of Minimalism, while alluding to and at the same time deflating the optimistic exuberance of much of Pop art.

Georg Herold’s Holz Ohne Raum (No Room for Wood) (1988) is an un-monumental, post-minimal totem, consisting of twelve pieces of wood bound together with screws and tape that leans against the wall. The dark humor of Herold’s work emerges in his use of “anti-art” materials such as wood, tape, and even caviar to create ambiguous situations open to the viewer’s interpretations.

Richard Artschwager (American, b. 1923) currently lives in New York. Richard Artschwager!, the first American survey of his work in 25 years, opens on October 25 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Adam McEwen (British, 1965) also lives in New York, and has been featured in museum exhibitions including “Haunted,” Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); “The Reach of Realism,” MoCA Miami (2009); “Into Me/Out of Me,” PS1 / MOMA, New York; and the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Georg Herold (German, 1947) lives and works in Cologne. He has exhibited internationally for over thirty years, with his most recent solo exhibition at the Museum Brandhorst in Munich (2012).