Visitors to the Cultural Center can pick up a copy of this handout, written by Joanna Goebel, to accompany the exhibit ‘Driven’:
Chicago artist John Himmelfarb is known for his unique vocabulary of abstract
forms which, depending on scale and composition, may range from pure
abstraction to evocations of gesture, form, landscape, architecture, and even
the characters of an idiosyncratic written language. In this exhibit, Himmelfarb
delves into our fascination with this iconic vehicle in a variety of styles — some
cartoonish, some expressionist, and some referring to the artist’s more typical
hieroglyphics.
Since 2003, images of trucks have become increasingly important in
Himmelfarb’s work. As small elements in his earlier work, they can be found
as far back as the late 1960s, but in the past eight years, they have taken
a central role. However, as images and sculptures, according to the artist,
these works “are not about trucks but about us, our histories, skills and coping
mechanisms, ambitions, and character.”
Trucks of any sort evoke work-ethic and self-sufficiency and, despite their
ubiquity in our everyday lives, are objects of fascination. Children and adults
alike are spellbound when watching powerful work trucks going about their
burly tasks. Synonymous with Americana, antique pickup trucks are objects of
nostalgia, symbolic of a simpler era, perhaps especially for those of us who were
not yet born at the time in which they were built. They are part of our collective
experience and imagination from an early age; as children, we play with them
in miniature, assemble them from kits, and use them to enact grown-up tasks.
As adults, we use them in our work and our recreation, and possibly even to
recapture a little childhood joy.
Maybe these vehicles of self-determinism are intriguing to us because their
numerous varieties and forms are indicative of different abilities, purposes and
functions. In this sense, they are ideal objects to communicate the facets of
human experience. In Himmelfarb’s hands, they become portraits and, in the
same way that collections of physical features on a human face can be beautiful,
and accretions of character lines and wrinkles are clues to personality and life
experience, these custom-built and retro-fitted trucks – with their fanciful cargos
and inventive paraphernalia, are entrees to compelling narratives of the human
condition.
