John Chamberlain

In 2009, Chamberlain came across an auction of vintage cars collected by the Messerli family in Kaufdorf, Bern. Described as an ‘auto graveyard’, the empty shells of vintage cars were stacked in endless rows and consumed by the forest, left to the unsparing will of nature for almost 80 years. Along with friend, collector, and collaborator Ernest Mourmans, Chamberlain acquired the bodies of dozens of 1940s and ’50s automobiles, ‘yanking motors out of them, and the transmissions and the brakes and the suspensions, the glass, all the wheels, the upholstery’. Chamberlain was particularly drawn to American-made cars as they had separate chassis, which could be easily removed, leaving the shells to be conquered. The artist then worked with crushers and other tools to compact the large sheets of the remaining metal into entirely new, expressionist forms.

Vintage cars in the Franz Messerli auto-graveyard in Kaufdorf, Bern, 2009 © Erik and Petra Hesmerg and More Gallery. Courtesy Fairweather & Fairweather LTD and More Gallery

These playful explorations often informed his work with automotive scrap metal—his ideal ‘art supply’—which continued throughout his career. The late works on view in Zurich explore the formal and full expressive potential of this once abandoned industrial material. While some series of works employed metals which were augmented with colour and pattern by Chamberlain, this series derives its palette entirely from the original paint finish applied to the metals from these mid-century cars.

Standing within the monochromatic forest of sculptures, ‘ENTIRELYFEARLESS’ (2009) preserves the original red paintwork of the automobile from which it was welded. Demonstrating the artist’s skilled ability to balance color and texture, this work echoes his belief that sculpture denotes a great deal of physicality, disrupting whatever space it occupies. Chamberlain worked in the round; from every perspective, the sculptures on view propose a new composition as the viewer explores each eccentric fold, twist and curl of steel. The mindful placement of the crushed car parts result in impossibly dynamic works that transform their original functionality into new and intriguing forms while establishing a pop art vernacular through the artist’s use of the ready-made.