'Smell of Oil', 2004
99h X 122w X 97d
'Corvette of my Heart', 2000
oil paint, medium, hand truck
107h X 153L X 69w
'Attempt to Bable #5', 2002
123h X 91w X 62d
The sculpture/furniture crossover art of Scott Richter has a rich history. Doris Salcedo and Mona Hatoum made affecting use of furniture's psychological and traumatic import. Scott Burton hopped back-and-forth across the borders of functional and aesthetic objects. Joseph Beuys used chairs and tables as repositories for resonant materials. Even Anthony Caro, maestro of the sprawling sculptural assemblage, made tabletop works that replayed his spatial playfulness on a domestic scale. Like these predecessors, Richter takes on the homespun associations of domestic furniture - cooking, eating, working - and leavens its emotional import by loading it down - literally - with layers of fat, sloppy, dribbly paint. The result is an array of sculptural works whose playfully cack-handed application hides a deceptively potent emotional sucker punch.
The association of the tabletop is that of the science experiment or culinary (mis)adventure, and many of Richter's sculptures - like the fat black Olden-burger of 'Smell of Oil', sinking through the table's surface and bellying beneath it - recall the trail of destruction of the amateur chemist. The tables' implication of control and organisation is gleefully belied by the gooey spontaneity of the paint itself, which Richter lets gulp and bubble over the table's edge, like an over-filled sandwich. Sometimes Richter's viscous paint, piled in geological layers, recalls the laissez-faire colour pools of Linda Benglis. Sometimes there's hints of Robert Rauschenberg, as in the hand truck loaded with a wedge of dribbling red paint entitled 'Corvette of my Heart'. Richter invites these references in a generous spirit of quixotic whimsy: 'Attempt to Bable 5' cites Breughel's famous 1563 painting of the Tower of Babel, relocating it as a flawed sculptural maquette - Tatlin's Monument to the Third International as made by the Swedish Chef.
To see more of his work registered on Saatchi Online click here
Ben Street
Ben Street is a teacher of Art History living in London, and every so often he writes on new and old art for Artnet, Triple Canopy, Art21 and Art Review. He is also a lecturer and storyteller for children aged between 3 and 19 at London's National Gallery, and spends his summers lecturing around Italy for Art History Abroad. Ben is a former educator at the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and started his career packing ice-cream at an ice-cream factory in East Anglia.
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