Since the 1960s, Richard Artschwager has been reconstructing objects associated with utility and domestic life—furniture, pictures, and other household items—but with deformations verging on the grotesque. Even purely semantic abstractions like punctuation marks are inserted into the elastic space of his art. At the same time, he tells us, this process is meant to “celebrate” the everyday object in its nonfunctionality. Artschwager worked as a cabinetmaker with his own workshop in the ’50s before committing to art almost a decade later—with work clearly influenced by his professional experience

The carpet was brown and cheap-looking, showing obvious signs of wear. Parts of the wall were still painted a smarmy pink hue left over from the last show. Nearly all of the temporary walls added for that previous exhibition, however, had been taken down—but the rough parts of the wall where the seams used to be remained unfinished. Above the gallery benches, soiled spots and greasy strips were still visible from where earlier visitors leaned their heads. And if you looked closely, you might have noticed out-of-place holes and awkwardly bent nails in the gaps between the pictures, the traces of