Basket, Table, Door, Window, Mirror, Rug #7 [recto] 1974

Curator: At first glance, this work by Richard Artschwager seems almost…claustrophobic, doesn’t it? There’s a starkness to the bare lines, an unfinished quality that evokes a strange stillness. Editor: I agree. Let me introduce the artwork: this is "Basket, Table, Door, Window, Mirror, Rug #7", a drawing completed in 1974. Artschwager uses line to delineate space and familiar objects, a kind of domestic still life rendered with graphic precision. It's made with drawing on paper. Curator: Precision maybe, but it feels haunted. It’s not just a room, but a diagram of absence. Each object is like a cipher. That window, for example, isn't offering an escape; it feels sealed shut. The lack of any shading really adds to that. Editor: That sealed feeling is so interesting. Windows, doors, mirrors they are such potent symbols! Traditionally, windows offer perspectives, opportunities, but here, framed by those decisive lines, it feels more like a barrier. The bareness emphasizes these basic symbols. Artschwager focuses our attention to forms rather than function, on a sense of disquiet and unfulfillment. Curator: Exactly! The rug looks like a trap laid on the floor! And the table placed right in front of the door as if someone tried to move it there to make a barricade… Or maybe I'm being overly dramatic... but, isn't there an incredible simplicity here? Like a child's drawing of what he finds fundamental. What gives meaning, you know. Table, Door, Window… Editor: Absolutely, there is a deep simplicity, even an innocence to that basic description, to our primordial sense of order, but the modernist context of such simplified geometric renderings inevitably echoes other visual symbols of utopian ideals and the social order such as we find in the Bauhaus or De Stijl movement. What did these forms promise us? Do we believe in the container or the possibility it can hold? It brings a deep anxiety. Curator: This made me really question what I thought I saw initially… I appreciate this chance to change perspective… To reassess our symbols. Editor: Same! Now the silence it has imposed seems less scary.