With its bold colours and enigmatic forms, Untitled from 1962 exemplifies the expressive power of John Chamberlain’s skilful manipulation of scrap metal. Crunching and twisting it into elegant and harmoniously balanced sculptures, Chamberlain’s works reveal the beauty and force of industrial materials.

Often fashioned from crushed automobile and industrial steel, Chamberlain’s distinctive metal sculptures are quintessential expressions of the power of innovation in postwar American art. Following three years in the US Navy during World War II, Chamberlain returned home to study art at the Art Institute of Chicago and then at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. He moved to New York in 1956, though he lived and worked across America throughout his career, moving between Manhattan, Long Island, Los Angeles, Santa Fe, Connecticut and Sarasota, Florida before finally settling on Shelter Island. As early as 1957, Chamberlain began incorporating automobile parts into his sculptures, and he continued to use this material over the course of his career. In the late 1960s, Chamberlain also experimented with galvanized steel, urethane foam, and mineral-coated Plexiglas, but he returned to the almost exclusive use of automobile parts in the mid-1970s.

A combination of smooth curves and jagged edges, the present sculpture’s folded metal components form a shape which evolves as one walks around it, hinting at natural forms. At certain angles it recalls a flower, or even the head of a horned animal. Its colours shift from bright reds to vivid greens and tarnished silvers, transitioning from one to another in the manner of an Abstract Expressionist painting. Wear and rough use have created abstract shapes and patterns in the paint, and what might be seen as damage on a functioning machine is here transfigured into accidental beauty.

The twisted and torqued sheets of metal capture a sense of the great force needed to bend them. Chamberlain’s sculptures possess a tense, condensed energy, and even this relatively small-scale work is imbued with a powerful dynamism. Chamberlain’s work is characterised by contradictions. His sculptures are still yet filled with energy, malleable yet rigid, the shaped metal proclaiming its industrial roots while also transforming into something else, rich and strange.

Please note that the availability and price of the above work are subject to change without prior notice. Where applicable ARR will be added.