Online Art Gallery

The Coloured Gates of Louisville
(The Inevitable Return of the Indefatigable Dr. Fay), 1988
John Chamberlain
(Born 1927, American)
Painted automotive steel over chrome (18' x 33'9" x 2'6")

Gift of The Mary and Barry Bingham, Sr., Fund
The Humana Foundation
Eleanor and Rowland Miller
An Anonymous Donor

John Chamberlain was 30 before he first used automobile sheet metal in his sculpture. He had previously made welded sculpture from iron rods. Car bodies were inexpensive, plentiful and easily available - attributes that suited Chamberlain's free-wheeling, improvisatory attitude towards art making. The artist calls himself an "assemblagist," and his working procedure is one of trying to create unexpected arrangements of color and form from his recycled metals. "Art is unprecedented knowledge," in Chamberlain's definition. "It's telling me something I don't know and I need to know."

In The Coloured Gates of Louisville, compressed, compacted and rolled car bodies are arranged to create shifting configurations that vary from near flatness to billowing volumes. Chamberlain composed the sculpture on the floor of his Florida studio, first laying down a base of chrome which reflects and enlivens the sheets in front. The evolution of the sculpture came as forms were added over the chrome. Finally the sculpture was welded together.

The ten units of The Coloured Gates of Louisville are positioned diagonally on the wall, creating a lunging dance. The buoyant visual energy of the composition belies the rawness and weight of Chamberlain's materials. Chamberlain believes that the knowledge art reveals is non-verbal and intuitive: "An artist makes a spiritual evaluation of the essence within a thing and then he gets it out; that is the outer appearance of the inner essence, and it is the point."