Curator, Ann Temkin: John Chamberlain is best known for his sculptures that use crumpled parts of automobiles. Those automobile parts, of course have readymade color, depending on whatever the car happened to be. These paintings which Chamberlain made in the early '60s are far less well known. It's in these paintings that Chamberlain played with color in a much more direct way than he had in his sculptures.
He made these paintings with automobile lacquer, not with fine artist's paints. The color would be dripped into a mainly clear lacquer so that there was just a bit of the red or the orange or the purple. He applied layer after layer, slowly, slowly, so gradually the intensity of that orange or the intensity of that purple built up.
Then, for a little bit of design, Chamberlin used a metal template that he found in a junkyard to put these grids of nine squares into the centers of the paintings with a contrasting color. And to almost embed them in the surface of the painting, he would then add a many more layers of the background color. For him this was really all about seeing color materialize before his very eyes.
What Chamberlin loved about these car colors was as he said, that they were the color of America. This was not the color of some hifalutin' artist; this was the color that filled our highways and our main streets. And indeed the metal flake surface of the sparkly paintings actually is the same as that you’d find not only a motorcycle but on an electric car or drum set.
Chamberlain gave these works all the titles of various pop music groups or musicians, like the Marquis or Elvis. He loved the idea that they would resonate with pop culture, not with high culture.