Richard Artschwager, born 1923 in Washington D.C., lives and works in New York. Artschwager has created a singular amalgam of sculpture and painting, of representation and abstraction, incorporating elements of a number of styles  Pop, Minimalism, Photo-Realism, and Conceptualism. Maker of pictorial, furniture-like sculpture, three-dimensional painting-surrogates, and abstract paintings that explore the nature of illusion, Artschwager has consistently sought to recontextualize the familiar. Formica, a laminate imitating wood, is a material Artschwager repeatedly uses. Its duality  appearing at once to be both real wood and painted pattern  refers to the viewers condition as a divided self, to the increasingly-total mediation of life as it is lived in the late twentieth-century, and to a world increasingly dominated by fraud and dissimulation.
The Corner Splat paintings ironically imitate Formica, an artificial, stale product of industry whose name has become part of American mass-culture vernacular. Suggesting material as well as perspective in a fake way, the Corner Splats stand in the tradition of trompe- l´oeil paintings. Hybrids of painting, sculpture and furniture, they confuse our concept of the objects surrounding us and carve out real and imaginary spaces which are exceptions to the hegemonic rationality of everyday life in the West.