The exhibition features over 135 works spanning six decades, including sculptures, paintings, drawings, photographs, and prints. Often associated with Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptual art, his work never fit neatly into any of these categories. His artistic practice consistently explored questions regarding his own visual and physical engagement with the world; his objects straddle the line between illusion and reality. The exhibition reveals the artist’s prescience in his career-long commitment to exploring the profound effect photography and technology have had in transforming our engagement with the world. His work has responded to and challenged how these media—and our experience of things as images rather than as things in themselves—have shifted human experience from being rooted in primary physical experience to a knowledge mediated by secondary sources such as newspapers, television, and the Internet.
Richard Artschwager! is the most comprehensive retrospective to date of Richard Artschwager's (1923–2013). The exhibition has been organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in association with the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, and curated by Jennifer Gross, Chief Curator and Deputy Director for curatorial affairs at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, in Lincoln, Massachusetts. The NMNM’s presentation is organized by Director Marie-Claude Beaud. Following the presentation of Richard Artschwager! at Whitney Museum, New York, the exhibition travelled to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the Haus der Kunst, Munich.
For more information, please visit the NMNM's website.