Fugue for Tinhorns

Date

1962

Creator

Indiana-born artist John Chamberlain is best known for his sculptures made from automobiles. In these early works, he cut, bent, crushed, and welded sections of auto bodies and strips of chrome trim to create multicolored, geometric sculptures...As in much contemporary art, the materials are common and the fabrication process is evident: there are paint scratches, distortions caused by folding the steel, and visible welds...The resulting object is purely abstract. It does not represent any specific thing, though it suggests many things from different angles: an architectural model, a mailbox, a heart-shaped candy box, a toy locomotive, even a homemade musical instrument. from Snite Museum of Art, Selected Works: Snite Museum of Art (Notre Dame, 2005)