Tools As Art: The Hechinger Collection

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Jonathan Borofsky, Hammering Man at No. 33025, 1990
handmade paper with cast paper collage, silkscreened and handpainted numbers
144 x 69 x 3 in.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1942, Jonathon Borofsky received a B.F.A. from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. After studying at the Ècole de Fontainebleau in 1964, Borofsky earned his M.F.A. from the Yale University School of Art in 1966. He works in a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking, and also creates site-specific installations. Borofsky had his first solo exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, in 1975 and has since exhibited throughout the world, including solo exhibitions at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Borofsky's work has also been included in three Whitney Biennials and in Documenta VII, Kassel, Germany. His work is included in many international museum collections. Borofsky's work has changed throughout his career, with his early conceptual work evolving into figurative and expressionistic modes. The artist has said that these stylistic shifts mirror the complexities of life. Among Borofsky's earliest pieces were pages across which he wrote numbers; he then stacked the pages and designated them sculptures. He continues to number his artworks. Because his work explores the duality between the rational and the emotive, much of his imagery is also drawn from dreams and the subconscious. Borofsky continually recycles images and ideas, reusing them in new contexts. Among the images he recycles are a series of archetypal figures--Molecule Man, Running Man, and Hammering Man--that represent different aspects of the individual and to which viewers are to bring their own ideas and associations.