Influenced by David Smith early on in his career, Chamberlain’s interest in the convergence of painting and sculpture, and industrial materials and techniques, led to innovative works of welded steel and aluminum, often crushed, warped, and painted. Chamberlain incorporated the painterly gestures of Abstract Expressionism, represented here in the planes of color in Jackson Pollock’s Vertical Composition (c.1953–55) and Richard Diebenkorn’s Berkeley #21 (1954). One can also grasp at the sheer variety within Chamberlain’s practice, from the small-scale SIMPLYSPLENDID (1986) that is rendered in bare stainless steel to the hulking, undulating forms of CUPCAKECUTIE (2008) or the brightly colored UNDERCOVERSRENDEZVOUS (1999).

Other strains of abstraction emerged in the subsequent decades after the initial wave of Abstract Expressionism in the immediate postwar period, including Color Field painting and Minimalism. Kenneth Noland’s Baba Yagga (1964) is a classic example of the flattened and highly reduced geometric composition found in the artist’s paintings of the mid-1960s, while Ellsworth Kelly’s Yellow Panel with Red Curve (1989) goes one step further, using its shaped monochrome canvases to determine its composition and destabilize the traditional figure-ground dynamic. Carl Andre’s 49 Pieces of Steel (1967) is equally innovative in its use of materials as composition. Far removed from the energetic sculptures of Chamberlain or the rich surfaces of Pollock, the steel plate grid determines its form and shakes off the traditional qualities of sculpture, such as dimensionality, craft, or personal expression.