John Chamberlain valuation
Crushed car bodies into sculpture that reads like Abstract Expressionist painting in three dimensions.
John Chamberlain was born in Rochester, Indiana, in 1927, served in the navy, and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and then at Black Mountain College, where what he actually studied was poetry.
What a work by John Chamberlain is worth
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Bio
John Chamberlain was born in Rochester, Indiana, in 1927, served in the navy, and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and then at Black Mountain College, where what he actually studied was poetry. From 1957 he began working with the painted steel of scrapped American cars — bumpers, wings, roof panels — crushed, bent and welded into sculpture that kept the factory colour and the chrome. The comparison everyone reached for was de Kooning, and the point was much the same: a mass of colour and torsion arrested at the moment it settles. He worked through foam rubber, crumpled paper, aluminium foil and film at various times and kept returning to the metal. He spent his last years on Shelter Island and died in 2011, a few months before a full retrospective opened at the Guggenheim.
What comes to market ranges from small table-sized pieces to monumental ones, and the surface is the work. The paint is the car manufacturer's, decades old, and cannot be replaced or retouched without destroying the thing being valued, so rust, overpaint, re-welding and replaced elements are what has to be established — and a sculpture that has stood outdoors will show it. The artist's estate is the authority on attribution, and dated studio documentation matters, because the material itself cannot be dated by eye.
At a glance
- Born
- 16 April 1927, Rochester
- Died
- 21 December 2011, Manhattan
- Movement
- Abstract Expressionism
More on Wikipedia.
Larry Rivers, Castelli and Sarasota
Chamberlain turned to metal in 1952, and in 1957, while staying with the painter Larry Rivers in Southampton, New York, began to use scrap from cars. His first major solo show was at the Martha Jackson Gallery in 1960, and in 1961 he was in The Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art. Leo Castelli represented him from 1962 to 1987 and Pace from 1987 to 2005.
From 1966 he made sculptures and sofas of rolled and tied urethane foam, and in the early 1980s a warehouse studio in Sarasota, Florida, let him work on a larger scale. Large groups of his work are at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, and at Dia:Beacon. The estate has been represented by Hauser & Wirth and Xavier Hufkens since 2019.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
