Kevin Zucker and Richard Arstchwager “Chair, Wall”

The National Exemplar

poster for Kevin Zucker and Richard Arstchwager “Chair, Wall”

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Like much of the work made over Richard Artschwager’s extraordinary career, Chair, 1965, embodies a set of propositions that lead us to self-contradictory or mutually exclusive conclusions– that is, to paradox. Chair is simultaneously two-dimensional representation and three-dimensional object; sculpture, furniture, and photography; the most basic form that a chair can take, and a singular historical example of seating. Chair traverses categories that traditionally suggest different relationships to use, contemplation, and value, as well as differing physical, psychological, and social orientations of human subjects.

Artschwager, in whose work the appearance of rationalism or solemnity always belies deeper absurdity, humor, and pathos, is a sustaining influence on Kevin Zucker. Zucker’s most recent works, crayon and pastel rubbings of walls modeled in digital space to appear as if receding in perspective, also exist suspended in a state of self-contradiction. Rubbings are evidence, souvenirs, tactile recordings of the places in which they were made, while digital models are scale-less and immaterial visualizations of data, often describing things that don’t yet (or could never) exist in physical reality. Rubbings non-fictionally document three-dimensional relief in two dimensions, while perspectival space and illusionistic light are depictive and fictional. Zucker forces these operations to coexist, using manual, mechanical, and digital processes to scramble the truth claims assumed of each.

Both artists capitalize on the human tendency to ascribe emotive qualities to inanimate objects, and both monumentalize– and memorialize– vernacular architecture and design. The chair photographically represented in Chair is a 19th-century American paint-decorated chair, the warmth and idiosyncrasy of which contrast with both the deadpan black-and-white of the photographs and the simplicity of the form to which they are laminated. Zucker’s Wall (Rubbing), 2016, is of decorative cinderblocks (aka screen blocks, claustra, or brise-soliel), whose ubiquity across geography and decades is offset by the structural and perspectival impossibility of both the representation and the process through which it’s created.

These works, along with others by Artschwager and Zucker in the exhibition, collapse periods and locales, the public and the domestic, connotation and denotation, fiction and nonfiction. Each work responds to our questions by opening onto another set of paradoxes.

Kevin Zucker was born 1976 in NYC.
Richard Artschwager was born 1923 in Washington, DC, died 2013 in Albany, NY.

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from January 31, 2017 to March 05, 2017

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