" The main function of art is to discover what you don’t know.”
An avant-garde artist associated with abstract expressionism, John Chamberlain never ceases to exploit the diversity of mediums. It is from poets like Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan and especially his teacher Charles Olson at Black Mountain College that Chamberlain says he learned "to see words", to manipulate them, to erase them only to reassemble them in the manner of a collage. It is by this same principle of association that he proceeds in his approach as a sculptor, as he assembles heterogeneous fragments of objects between them. He works from the old car wrecks that abound in the backyards of 1950s America; he picks up the scrap before assembling it, crumpling it, undoing it, folding it back and straightening it to arrive at a whole. Thus, whatever the medium, Chamberlain applies the same postulate: "to start from the observation of the form and to see what comes of it".