John Chamberlain: John Chamberlain

Iconic Sculptures by John Chamberlain to Return to Dia Beacon
Beacon, New York, June 4, 2026—Dia Art Foundation today announced further details of John Chamberlain at Dia Beacon. Chamberlain is an artist synonymous with the museum itself, his works having been on display in the expansive west gallery since the opening of Dia Beacon in 2003 until 2024. Chamberlain’s iconic sculptures now return in a newly conceived installation. John Chamberlain opens on June 13, 2026, and will be on long-term view.

“John Chamberlain has been foundational to our program since its earliest years, and his legacy at Dia is not only historical but ongoing, reflecting our deep institutional commitment to bringing this work to our audiences. His sculptures, at once materially rigorous and improvisational, have shaped the identity of Dia Beacon and offered decades of visitors a sustained encounter with his unique approach to scale, form, and process,” said Jessica Morgan, Dia’s Nathalie de Gunzburg Director.

John Chamberlain’s dynamic objects, often made of crushed car parts in exuberant palettes, merge the gestural spontaneity of Abstract Expressionism with the consumerist vernacular of Pop art. During the late 1960s, Chamberlain moved away from his signature medium to experiment with more pliable materials, such as urethane foam, finding new expressions and forms in the process. Spanning three decades of art from Dia’s collection, this exhibition features work from Chamberlain’s exploratory period, his emblematic steel sculptures, and his later innovations in color and scale.

This selection includes 12 of Chamberlain’s urethane foam sculptures, which he produced between 1966 and ’70. In these pieces, Chamberlain worked at a smaller scale, displaying his characteristically intuitive process with a material that could be easily cut, squeezed, and tied to create tactile forms. Soon after, Chamberlain introduced color into these works, as seen in the Stuffed Dogseries (1967–70) where he dripped or sprayed paint sparingly onto the foam. His simultaneous experiments with galvanized steel hold formal and procedural similarities to the foam pieces, extending his engagement with alternative materials in this period.

Large-scale sculptures from 1979 onward demonstrate Chamberlain’s emphatic return to painted steel. Later works, such as The Line Up (Dedicated to the Sarasota Police Department) (1982), showcase his newfound interest in coloration, applied through airbrushing, spraying, and sandblasting. This exhibition also reveals a heightened sense of bodily engagement through compositions, orientations, and scales, ranging from the grounding-hugging form of the Gondola series (1981–82) to the towering structures of Luftschloss (1979) and Daddy in the Dark (1988). Shown for the first time in a decade, the monumental installation The Privet (1997) is composed of intertwined metal tendrils that create an almost pictorial plane, existing somewhere between painting and sculpture.

“With his inimitable material sensibility, Chamberlain found in everyday materials endless sculptural possibilities while upholding their inherent properties. His works are imbued with rigor, intuition, and humor as well as a corporeal presence. This exhibition foregrounds the versatility of Chamberlain’s sculptural language across materials, forms, and spatial modes—from soft to hard, fragmented to voluminous, and pictorial to architectonic,” said Min Sun Jeon, assistant curator.

John Chamberlain is curated by Min Sun Jeon, assistant curator.

All exhibitions at Dia are made possible by the Economou Exhibition Fund.

About John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain was born in Rochester, Indiana, in 1927. After serving in the United States Navy during World War II, Chamberlain attended the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1950s. In 1955 and ’56, Chamberlain studied and taught sculpture at Black Mountain College, North Carolina. He moved to New York in 1956, and in the following year made Shortstop, his first sculpture incorporating crushed metal from cars. Chamberlain’s first major solo show was then presented at Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, in 1960. His work was included in The Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1961, and he began showing at Leo Castelli’s New York gallery in 1962. Chamberlain had his first retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1971, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, held a second retrospective in 1986. In 2012, the Guggenheim Museum presented another retrospective that included 17 works from Dia’s collection. Chamberlain has received numerous honors, including the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture (1993); the Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture from the International Sculpture Center, Washington, D.C. (1993); the Gold Medal from the National Arts Club, New York (1997); and the Distinction in Sculpture Award from the Sculpture Center, New York (1999). Chamberlain died in New York in 2011.

About Dia Art Foundation

Taking its name from the Greek word meaning “through,” Dia was established in 1974 with the mission to serve as a conduit for artists to realize ambitious new projects, unmediated by overt interpretation and uncurbed by the limitations of more traditional museums and galleries. Dia’s programming fosters contemplative and sustained consideration of a single artist’s body of work, and its collection is distinguished by the deep and longstanding relationships that the nonprofit has cultivated with artists whose work came to prominence particularly in the 1960s and ’70s.

In addition to Dia Beacon, Dia Bridgehampton, and Dia Chelsea, Dia maintains and operates a constellation of commissions, long-term installations, and site-specific projects, notably focused on Land art, nationally and internationally. These include:

Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), Max Neuhaus’s Times Square (1977), and Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks, inaugurated in 1982 and ongoing), all in New York
De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977), in western New Mexico
Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), in the Great Salt Lake, Utah
Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973–76), in the Great Basin Desert, Utah
De Maria’s The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977), in Kassel, Germany
Cameron Rowland’s Depreciation (2018)
Media contacts

(U.S. press inquiries)
Hannah Gompertz
Dia Art Foundation
hgompertz@diaart.org
212 293 5598

Melissa Parsoff
Parsoff Communications
mparsoff@parsoff-communications.com
516 445 5899

(International press inquiries)
Sam Talbot
sam@sam-talbot.com
+44 (0) 772 5184 630