Sculpture is for the touch, painting is for the eye. I wanted to make a sculpture for the eye, and a painting for the touch.

American sculptor and painter Richard Artschwager was born in 1923 in Washington D.C. He first studied chemistry, biology, and mathematics at Cornell University, and then art in New York under Amedee Ozenfant, one of the pioneers of abstraction. During the early 1950s he became involved in cabinetmaking, producing simple pieces of furniture. Although he kept his furniture workshop running for many years, in the early 1960s he settled on making sculpture. Using Formica on wood, he began to make pieces that mimicked actual furniture (Chairs, Tables), while simultaneously evoking the purism and geometric forms of Constructivism and the materials and fabrication of Minimalism. Yet, by choosing everyday objects for his subject matter, he came close to the work of Pop artist such as Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, and Roy Lichtenstein.

Portrait III--made of Formica with applied color, in this case yellow--is a simple, cubical form that resembles a chest of drawers. The piece was produced in 1989, but has two older siblings--Portrait I and Portrait II, both from 1963. While Portrait I consists of a piece of actual furniture--a wooden dresser with a painted portrait of a person (perhaps the artist) sitting on top of it--Portrait II and Portrait III are fabricated in Formica as sculptural objects that look like furniture. In the latter two works, the portrait is replaced with a square panel attached to the object, like a mirror to a dresser. Painted in solid yellow, the panel is faceless and reflects nothing but its own flat surface. This work, like many other of Artschwager's pieces, plays with levels of representation --to what extent does the work reveal reality and to what extent does it create an illusion?--thus confronting viewers with their own habits of perception.

In addition to sculpture and furniture, Artschwager's later work includes paintings (portraits, landscapes, still-lifes, and interiors on celotex fiberboard), drawings (of simple objects such as a basket, table, or door), and photographs. However, what has always been the most important for him is the blending of genres. By combining object and picture he has continued to challenge the boundaries between art forms, as well as those between high and low art, making us question the placement his work, in the domain of high art, functional object, or somewhere in-between.