Richard Artschwager’s work defies categorization, yet it often combines elements of both Pop Art and Minimalism. An early example of his “furniture surrogates,” which draw upon his experience as the owner of a successful carpentry and furniture-design business, Table with Pink Tablecloth was exhibited— along with other compact, geometric masses wrapped with formica “pictures” so that they resemble domestic items—in his first solo show at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, in 1965. Artschwager described this work as “the way a table with a tablecloth is in a painting, in a still life—a three-dimensional still life.” Too short to be useful as a piece of furniture, this translation of a Parsons table depicts a solid form as both mass and void and attempts to reveal the levels of deception involved in pictorial illusionism.
