“Sculpture is for the touch, painting is for the eye. I wanted to make a sculpture for the eye and a painting for the touch”. This mix-up is typical of Artschwager’s oeuvre, to which such labels as Pop Art, Minimal Art and Conceptual Art do not do justice. None of these terms adequately describes his artistic intentions, where several levels of visual and conceptual deception operate. For instance, he made use of Formica because it is both an industrial product and a ‘false’ representation of another material, in this case wood. In the 1960s and 1970s, Artschwager created works that ‘could be furniture, sculpture or the representation of both’. As from the 1990s, he made his ‘Splatter Pieces’, which he squeezed into the corners of exhibition spaces so that they remained midway between a three-dimensional painting and a two-dimensional sculpture.
