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Indepth Arts News:
"Fred Sandback: Sculptures and Drawings"
2005-05-08 until 2005-06-26
Kettle's Yard Gallery, University of Cambridge
Cambridge, ,
UK United Kingdom
Kettle's Yard is presenting an exhibition of sculptures and drawings by the
American artist Fred Sandback (1943-2003). The exhibition has been
organized by Kettle’s Yard. Sandback is associated with Minimalism but his work defies such simple
labelling. While he shares Minimalism’s ambition to subvert the traditional
space of sculpture and the relationship between viewer and object, his work
does not exploit the manufactured materials of Dan Flavin, the repeated
units of Carl Andre, Don Judd and Sol LeWitt, or the monumental scale of
Richard Serra.
Distinctively, Sandback developed a way of working that dispensed with the
mass and weight of materials, and ultimately used acrylic yarn, sometimes
multi-coloured, stretched across architectural space. He made sculptures
whose factual existence plays against the perceptual illusions they create,
addressing their physical surroundings, as well as the spectator in what he
called the 'pedestrian space’ ‘ . . . literal, flat-footed, and everyday.
The idea was to have the work right there along with everything else in the
world, not up on a spatial pedestal . . . a sculpture was there to be
engaged actively, and it had utopian glimmerings of art and life happily
co-habiting.' [1]
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Including works spanning more than thirty years this exhibition is
accompanied by a well-illustrated catalogue with an introduction by Lynne
Cooke, Curator of the Dia Art Foundation. It follows in the wake of last
year’s exhibition Immaterial at Kettle's Yard, which explored the
dematerialisation of sculpture in the work of Brancusi, Gabo and
Moholy-Nagy. The exhibition has been supported by The Henry Moore
Foundation.
Fred Sandback was born in Bronxville, New York in 1943. He majored in
philosophy at Yale before studying sculpture at Yale School of Art and
Architecture. He exhibited widely in America and Europe, though rarely in
the UK. From 1981 until 1996 his work was shown at the Fred Sandback Museum
in Winchendon, Massachusetts, under the auspices of the Dia Art Foundation,
and is now part of the permanent displays of Dia:Beacon outside New York.
[1] Sandback, Fred. "Remarks on My Sculpture, 1966–86." In Fred Sandback.
Hannover: Kestner Gesellschaft, 1987, p. 26.
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