Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Dorkdorf
John Chamberlain American
Not on view
Chamberlain used automotive steel salvaged from junk-yards as the material for his sculptures, adopting early modernist techniques of collage and assemblage to interlock crushed, crumpled, and fragmented car parts into complex, monumental forms. In this resolutely abstract work, the components are re-formed so that their previous uses are entirely erased. Chamberlain, who studied poetry at Black Mountain College (a progressive arts school in North Carolina in operation from 1933 until 1957), titled his works by playing with words in a nonlinear manner that defies logical order. Although Chamberlain insisted his art was about material innovation, fit, and scale—the visual poetics of collage—the twisted automobile bodies nevertheless carry connotations of materialism, consumer waste, and violence.
