Dinner for one

Cristin Tierney
Oct 5, 2012 9:50PM

Don’t you get that warm, fuzzy feeling when you think about Richard Artschwager? He’s almost ninety years old, and about to be celebrated with a full scale retrospective at the Whitney Museum. I have always loved his sculptural works. Their quirky geometries, the unorthodox materials—where does someone get rubberized hair? He is an American original if ever there was one.

Single Dinner is a perfect blend of the surreal and the domestic. A natural extension of the ideas seen in Meret Oppenheim’s Object (the fur lined tea cup) from 1936, Artschwager simply adds a minimalist emphasis on geometries and right angles. At its heart, this work is a Tony Smith sculpture with a six o’clock shadow, evoking an absent presence: the lonely figure wedged into the corner booth at a late night diner. The person we are all afraid we’ll one day become.

Cristin Tierney