Choices

John Chamberlain: Choices is the catalogue for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's 2012 survey of the sculptor's work in painted and chromium-plated steel. Much of the work was fabricated from crushed automobile body parts. The exhibition ran at the Guggenheim in New York from February 24 to May 13, 2012, then traveled to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 2013.

Edited by Susan Davidson, the 247-page volume gathers essays tracing Chamberlain's career from his early assemblages of the 1950s to the foam, paper, and painted steel works of his later decades. Contributors include Dave Hickey, Charles Ray, Adrian Kohn, and Donna De Salvo. Helen Hsu supplies a chronology and Don Quaintance a lexicon of Chamberlain's working vocabulary. The book is illustrated throughout, chiefly in color.

Chamberlain (1927-2011) began welding automobile-body panels into sculpture in the late 1950s. He used the material's factory paint and pre-formed curves to translate the gestural vocabulary of Abstract Expressionist painting into three dimensions. Choices, which opened months after the artist's death, drew together work from across his five-decade career, from raw junkyard assemblages to the more tightly worked pieces of his final years.