John Chamberlain - New Now New York Wednesday, March 8, 2023 | Phillips
  • John Chamberlain’s Anteambulo Quincunx, 1992, consists of several loops of twisted and crumpled automobile metal, painted in a riotous range of colorful patterns. Some are airbrushed roughly, such as the teal, orange, and navy bull’s eyes, while others, like the white and pink brushstrokes on an aqua surface, are more delicately applied. The clashing patterns emphasize the tension of the metal strips, which pull one another into place. As one walks around the sculpture, new shapes become visible—both on the painted surfaces, and in the spaces between the overlapping loops. Anteambulo Quincunx offers a case study of Chamberlain’s poetic approach to painting, and meaning-making, via the surface and form of his metal sculptures.

     

    “You use [colors] in a graffiti manner, or as though you were writing a foreign language that you didn’t really know, so you write as if it were a penmanship exercise rather than communication. That’s the way I paint. My graffiti, or what’s referred to as graffiti in my work, expresses my thoughts about how painting comes about.”
    —John Chamberlain

    The use of visible brushstroke, common symbol, and painted line in sculptures such as Anteambulo Quincunx is critically referred to as graffiti in Chamberlain’s sculpted oeuvre, likely for the popular connection between spray paint and street art.i Indeed, graffiti artists often tag scrapped cars, Chamberlain’s preferred source of scrap metal. The airbrushed lines of Anteambulo Quincunx recall these graffiti tags, in which the tagged word is abstracted beyond legibility. 


    Chamberlain calls on the poetic abstraction of meaning in graffiti through the titling and material form of the present work. The title to Anteambulo Quincunx is in Latin, but it doesn’t mean anything; the first word means “forerunner,” while the second is a portmanteau of the words for “five” and “twelve,” which names a particular Roman coin. The words do not relate to one another grammatically, or contextually. The title Anteambulo Quincunx, rather, functions as a sound.

     

    Detail of the present work.

    Chamberlain’s wordplay in his titles shows the influence of poetry on his aesthetic approach.ii Take Chamberlain’s use of French in the title Kidd Eau, 1991, private collection , as a parallel example. Eau does not mean “water,” here; instead, the word signifies its sound. Kidd Eau is a pun: kiddo.  In the same way, Anteambulo Quincunx are not words, but a pattern of language on the page, parallel to the painted lines of the sculpture it names.iii The title and painted surface are both, per Chamberlain, “a penmanship exercise rather than a communication” that represents “the way I paint.”iv The sound of Anteambulo Quincunx is more important than its Latin meaning; the work is more about the gesture than the specificity of representation.


    Translating this idea more directly into sculpture, the form of Anteambulo Quincunx is more important than the specific meaning or connotation of the material. Though Chamberlain rose to fame in the 1960s for his use of scrapped car metal, he insists that this choice of material is a matter of form, of finding “the material that offers you just the right resistance [to] make a form—not overform it or underform it,” rather than an artistic commentary on cars as objects.v In 1990, the artist began working exclusively with van tops and chrome bumpers, materials that best allowed him to make the metal strips he painted for works such as Anteambulo Quincunx.vi

     

    Anteambulo Quincunx achieves Chamberlain’s ideal balance of form at a masterful level. The metal strips are so tightly knotted, it seems that to pull one away would cause the whole composition to collapse. The sculpture is neither over- nor under-formed; it is an exemplum of the “right resistance” Chamberlain celebrated throughout his career.


    i John Chamberlain, quoted in Sprayed: Works from 1929 to 2015, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, London, 2015, p. 47.
    ii For more on Chamberlain and poetry, see Elisa Wouk Almino, “John Chamberlain’s Previously Unknown Poems From Black Mountain College,” Hyperallergic, April 16, 2020, online; “John Chamberlain: Poetic Form,” Gagosian, 2016, online.
    iii Chamberlain, quoted in Almino.
    iv Chamberlain, quoted in Sprayed, ibid.
    v Chamberlain, quoted in “John Chamberlain,” Gagosian, online; Chamberlain, quoted in Henry Geldzahler, “Interview with John Chamberlain,” John Chamberlain: Recent Work, exh. cat., The Pace Gallery, New York, 1992, n.p.
    vi Chamberlain, quoted in Geldzahler, ibid.

    • Provenance

      The Pace Gallery, New York
      Heiner Friedrich, New York
      Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2005

    • Exhibited

      New York, The Pace Gallery, John Chamberlain: Recent Sculpture, September 17–October 15, 1994, pp. 22, 23, 45 (illustrated, p. 23)
      New York, Gagosian Gallery, Dan Flavin & John Chamberlain, October 25–December 20, 2003
      New York, Gagosian Gallery, Summer Group Show, July 6–September 15, 2007
      Moscow, Gagosian Gallery at Red October Chocolate Factory, for what you are about to receive, September 18–October 25, 2008, pp. 38, 39, 223 (illustrated)
      London, Gagosian Gallery, Sprayed: Works from 1929 to 2015, June 11–August 1, 2015, pp. 44–46, 220 (Gagosian Gallery, London, 2015 installation view illustrated, pp. 44–46, 204, 207)

    • Literature

      Meredith Mendelsohn, "Spray Paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paul Klee, and Others at Gagosian London," Architectural Digest, May 31, 2015, online (illustrated)

Property from a Distinguished Collection

23

Anteambulo Quincunx

painted steel
43 x 77 x 59 in. (109.2 x 195.6 x 149.9 cm)
Executed in 1992.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$400,000 - 600,000 

Sold for $317,500

Contact Specialist

Avery Semjen
Head of Sale, New Now
212 940 1207
asemjen@phillips.com

New Now

New York Auction 8 March 2023