Potato Chips, 2024
Robin Antar (b. 1957)
Yule marble and 3d prints

Base 12”h x 40”w X 63”d
Sculpture 33”h X 33”w X 58”d

“Two different brands of potato chips inspired the form and color
of the chips in this piece. America loves its comfort food!”
- Robin Antar

"Potato Chips" is one of Antar's most ambitious works in the Realism in Stone series, twenty-two years in the making. Carved from a six-thousand-pound block of Colorado Yule marble, the bag holds the crumpled, mid-motion posture of a snack set down on a counter. Its interior was professionally silver-leafed, a finished detail carried out with the same care as the exterior. The chips themselves are 3D-printed and hand-painted by the artist, marrying contemporary fabrication to the slowest sculptural tradition there is. The disjunction between subject and scale is the work's argument: a single-serving snack, designed to be consumed and forgotten, given the dimensions and gravity of a public monument. American consumerism produces icons by accident. Antar treats them as such on purpose, carving the disposable into the historical and asking what a culture chooses to remember when it remembers itself through its products.