Leo Castelli Gallery, New York

The Tremaine Collection, New York & Madison, Connecticut (acquired from the above)

Sale: Christie's, New York, 8th November 2011, lot 76

Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum, The Tremaine Collection: 20th Century Masters, The Spirit of Modernism, 1984, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

S. Clover, 'For the Love of Art', Connecticut Cottages and Gardens, November 2007, illustrated in colour

One of the earliest wall-mounted sculptures the artist produced, the abstract arrangement of Gramm identifies it with the very best of John Chamberlain’s œuvre. This work perfectly synthesizes the maelstrom of artistic styles which the late Twentieth Century brought forth in both America and Europe. Across its rippled folds and through its brilliant flashes of colour, we see the unabashed influence of the Abstract Expressionists. Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline were friends of Chamberlain, and the power of their forceful multi-coloured mark-making undoubtedly prefigured the chromatic gusto on show in this work.

Chamberlain first took the radical step of appropriating abandoned car parts for creative use in 1958: on finding an old Ford truck in the garage of a house his family were renting, the sculptor crushed the fenders with his own car then welded the remnants together to form a totally original creation. The automobile sculptures caused a sensation when exhibited in Chamberlain’s first solo show at Martha Jackson Gallery in 1960, arousing diverse critical observations: 'Their very physical substance is a commentary about our times, our conspicuous waste, our confused values' (Emily Genauer in John Chamberlain: Choices (exhibition catalogue), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2012, p. 195). This concept of the negative aspects of consumerist culture signified by the warped segments of disused car parts - remnants of a desirable commodity, ownership of which connoted a connection to the traditional idea of the ‘American Dream’ - adds another layer of meaning to Chamberlain’s multifaceted and stunningly complex automobile works. The sculptor also took great care over the significance of titles for his pieces: fascinated by the innate sound and appearance of words, his titles frequently featured a memorable conjunction of disparate phrases or words, a practice wittily reflected within Gramm.

Gramm’s delicate scale is synonymous with early Chamberlain's sculptures and adds a degree of intimacy, which contrasts markedly to the larger, bolder pieces that he progressed to. Yet his ability to convey both power and gravitas to his smaller works, while retaining a degree of delicacy was the defining feature of his early work, as his dealer Allan Stone commented: 'Perhaps John's most amazing talent is his ability to play with scale. In his early work, the small pieces are as exciting as the larger works. They have terrific scale. If you saw a photograph you couldn't tell if a piece was 6 feet or 6 inches tall; they're perfectly done. Very few artists can achieve this transposition of scale, among the ones who can are Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning' (A. Stone, 'John Chamberlain', in John Chamberlain (exhibition catalogue), Allan Stone Gallery, New York, 2003). Gramm c✅an be regarded as a consummate expression of the sculptor’s early corpus as well as a celebration of a material that Chamberlain had made distinctively his own.