A n early example of the artist’s pursuit of transforming the functional into the aesthetic, Lefrak City exemplifies the radical approach that Richard Artschwager took to painting in the early 1960s, transposing photographs onto the tactile surface of Celotex. Trained as a cabinetmaker and furniture manufacturer, Artschwager’s fascination with industrial materials crystallizes in the painting, the textured surface of the Celotex and resultant blurry image juxtaposed against the shiny faux-wood Formica frame that surrounds it.
After encountering a Franz Kline painting in Chicago in 1962 that the artist had done on Celotex, Artschwager began to explore the medium – a cheap, fiberboard insulation material used in buildings – as a surface upon which to explore painting, depicting the world around him through vintage snapshots of everyday life and newspaper clippings on a surface that effectively mirrored these source images. The fibrous, hairy weave and randomized tooth of the Celotex, which lump together at certain points in stark contrast to the standardized weave of canvas, would break up the paint applied in a manner similar to the poor reproduction quality of newspaper images, disintegrating the picture plane into grainy semblances of reality. Especially of interest to Artschwager was the tangibility of the surface of Celotex and its layered elements, a rough surface that seemed to counter the rigidity and formality of canvas.
Lefrak City, one of the earliest examples of Artschwager’s forays into the material that would come to define his career, depicts the huddled skyrises of the eponymous city that was actively being constructed while Artschwager depicted it. A self-proclaimed “City of Tomorrow,” the Queens enclave was designed to be a self-contained haven for working and middle class families who didn’t have the means of living in Manhattan. Frequently culling his source imagery from cheaply printed reproductions in newspapers and magazines, the image of Lefrak City was taken from a Spanish language newspaper that the artist then methodically projected onto the canvas using a Renaissance drawing technique, gridding the image off into 24 distinct boxes that could then formulaically be drawn onto the Celotex.
Drawn to the intermingling of materials and the ways that they are juxtaposed against one another, the blurred, grisaille image of Lefrak City is structured by the shiny, Formica frame around it. Formica, a laminate material used in furniture and countertops to mimic the surface of woodgrain – a cheap alternative to the real thing meant to easily simulate reality – simultaneously plays into Artschwager’s own chosen imagery and his blurred representation of a very real image. The Formica, invariably smooth and shiny, plays directly off of the rough, muddled surface of the Celotex in a confluence of materials that oscillates the work between painting and sculpture, a masterful and ironic toying with industrial materials that might have been used in the very buildings Artschwager is depicting.
“It was formica which touched me off. Formica, the great ugly material, the horror of the age, which I came to like suddenly because I was sick of looking at all this beautiful wood.”
Reveling in the space between conceptual exercise and aesthetic representation, Richard Artschwager’s Lefrak City combines many of the most crucial elements of the artist’s career and explorations into the limits of the painted surface. Exhibited widely throughout the artist’s career, including at his 1988 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Lefrak City is both a fastidios us representation of reality and a simultaneous abstraction of it, an intermingling of the two imposed by the artist’s radical choice of materials.
