Acclaimed for his large-scale sculptures assembled from automobile parts, John Chamberlain (1927-2011) worked in various media from paintings and installations to prints and photographs.
Born in Rochester, Indiana, he served in the US Navy in the mid-1940s and attended the Art Institute of Chicago (1951-52) and Black Mountain College in North Carolina (1955-56). Over his fifty-year career, Chamberlain had solo exhibitions in New York at Leo Castelli and Pace galleries as well as many other solo gallery and museum exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad. Influence by the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1950’s, Chamberlain’s polychrome metal constructions blurred the boundaries between painting and sculpture. As the artist once said: “Kline gave me the structure and De Kooning gave me the color.”
Chamberlain represented the United States in the Venice Biennale in 1964 and the São Paulo Biennale in 1961 and 1994. He participated in Documenta in Kassel, Germany, 1982 and the Whitney Biennial in 1973 and 1987. Both the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles have hosted retrospectives of his work in 1971 and 1986 respectively.
Chamberlain's work is represented in many major public collections worldwide including the Menil Collection, Houston; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis among many others.
