Richard Stankiewicz (1922–1983) was an American sculptor recognized as one of the pioneers of "junk art" and assemblage. Composed of welded pipes, nuts, bolts, screws, clockworks and other junkyard scraps, Stankiewicz’s carefully ordered sculptural compositions both respect the fragmentary, arbitrary character of their materials as well as transform them. Beginning in the 1950s with roots in the work of Jean Tinguely, Dubuffet, Duchamp and other such predecessors, the artist’s “junk” aesthetic moved from the whimsical to forbidding and then in the 1970s into hard-edge abstractions.
