“START! Stadler x Richard Artschwager” Exhibition
Carpenters Workshop Gallery
This event has ended.
Carpenters Workshop Gallery presents START! Stadler x Richard Artschwager, an exhibition curated by Glenn Adamson in collaboration with Robert Stadler. The exhibition positions historic works by Richard Artschwager (United States, 1923–2013) alongside new, transdisciplinary works by Robert Stadler (Austria, b. 1966), offering a fresh perspective on their respective practices and careers. The exhibition’s title com- bines fragments of the artists’ names and invites us to think anew.
Both Artschwager and Stadler are known for making objects that dissolve the traditional distinctions between art and design, punctuating space both literally and figuratively. Among the iconic works by Artschwager featured in START! are Apostrophe (1966), Exclamation Point (Wood) (1970), and Leaning Chair (2010), all of which were selected for their engagement with spatial and functional dynamics. Artschwager thrived on crossing boundaries between genres and media, communicating the strangeness of everyday objects while foregrounding the workings of human perception. Significantly, he also applied an artisanal sensi- bility to synthetic materials such as Formica and Celotex.
Stadler‘s works echo his predecessor’s innovative manipulation of surface and subs- tance. 3DPD (2022)—the series’ title alludes to traditional pietre dure—is waterjet cut from a specta- cular decorative marble called Striato Olimpico. This material is typically used as a veneer, but Stadler intentionally exposes its “wrong” faces—the mineral equivalent of a broadcast breaking down into white noise. Return of the Thing (2021) appears to be carved from wood but is actually made using hydrographic printing; Fantom Light (2022) features real stone inlay alongside a textile digitally printed with a faux marble pattern, echoing Artschwager’s frequent use of Formica. As Stadler puts it, “Today, thanks to the multitude of available production technologies, objects can take on any shape and any appearance. The real and the fake, the natural and the artificial, blend into each other in a previously uninhibited way.”
Co-founders Julien Lombrail and Loïc Le Gaillard and Director of the Americas Ashlee Harrison present this exhibition as a continuation of the gallery’s commitment to locating functional art in new and sometimes radical contexts. “This exhibition epitomizes what we’re looking to do at the galle- ry,” says Lombrail, “to break down the boundaries between art and design and present functional art that people can live and interact with in meaningful ways.”
START! Robert Stadler x Richard Artschwager coincides with PLAYDATE, a solo exhibition by Stadler at The Glass House in New Canaan, CT, also opening in September 2022, and builds on the precedent of Stadler’s exhibition Solid Doubts at the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York, in 2017. Adamson notes: “Stadler has spent his career considering questions of attention and meaning. He has applied his flexible yet incisive mind to all sorts of projects, in all sorts of different categories. What unites it all is the ability to assume multiple vantage points all at once, every hierarchi- cal assumption suspended, creating the conditions in which something truly new can arise. This rela- tional approach has few precedents—but there are some. One is Isamu Noguchi; a second is Richard Artschwager.”
Robert Stadler was born in 1966 in Vienna, Austria. He studied design at IED/Milan and at ENSCI/Paris. In 1992 he cofounded the Radi Designers group which was active until 2008. The group created limited edition pieces as well as major industrial design commissions for Air France or Moulinex.
In 2001 Robert Stadler set up his own design studio in Paris. He works for clients such as Drucker, Hermès, Lobmeyr, Thonet and Vitra and also has created a number of limited edition pieces for Carpenters Workshop Gallery. His work is included in the permanent collections of the MAK - Museum for Applied Arts / Contemporary Art in Vienna, Les Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Fondation Cartier pour l’Art contemporain, Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Kunstmuseen Krefeld and Vitra Design Museum.
Stadler has also curated several exhibitions amongst which QUIZ at Galerie Poirel in Nancy and at MUDAM Luxemburg. In 2017 the Noguchi Museum in New York presented his first institutional exhibition in the US in dialogue with Isamu Noguchi’s works. In the same year his first survey exhibition was shown at Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau in Dresden, Germany. He designed and curated the exhibition “Typecasting - An Assembly of Iconic, Forgotten and New Vitra Characters” at La Pelota during Milan Design Week 2018.
Robert Stadler intervenes in diverse fields, obliterating hie- rarchies between — as he puts it — Duty Free proposals, and industrial or public commissions. He regularly explores the exhibition context in or- der to question the identity of objects.
Media
Schedule
from September 28, 2022 to November 23, 2022