ART CITIES:Paris-Fred Sandback

The American artist Fred Sandback (1943–2003) worked with elastic cord and acrylic yarn to delineate or bifurcate three-dimensional space, creating room-filling volumetric forms using the most minimal of means. By stretching single strands of yarn point-to-point to create geometric figures, Sandback’s near intangible objects nevertheless amounted to precise and subtle delineations of pictorial planes and architectural volumes.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Marian Goodman Archive

Despite this relationship to the built environment and to the practice of drawing, Fred Sandback became known primarily as a Minimalist sculptor, alongside Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre, but Sandback was also a forerunner of and a major influence on many of today’s installation artists. Contrary to his own matter-of-fact artistic statements about his practice, his work has been said to conjure up references to architecture, painting, sculpture and even music, given his early fascination for stringed musical instruments. The exhibition “Fred Sandback: Le Fil d’Occam”, at Galerie Marian Goodman in Paris, pays homage to the radicalism and purity of Sandback’s work with a selection of sculptures, drawings and prints made between 1967 and 2002. Emerging from the American scene of the 1960s, Sandback sought to raise line to a new, pure level by working with acrylic yarn, creating multidirectional networks that map out materially fragile yet precise geometrical forms and volumes in space. After experimenting with a number of materials in his early works, including elastic cord in “Untitled (Corner Piece)” (1967), in the mid- 1970s Sandback settled on acrylic yarn. This could be white, black, or colored, a choice which was made intuitively in response to the context. Although each work was developed in conversation with the specificities of the architectural settings, Sandback’s three-dimensional works were never limited to a fixed site; they can be reinterpreted. As such, some twelve sculptures, including “Untitled (Sculptural Study, Twelve-Part Vertical Construction)” (1982/2016), or “Untitled (Sculptural Study, Four-part Wall Construction)” (1999/2008), have all been reinstalled in the gallery for this exhibition. Based not only on the tension of the lines but also on the invisibility of the system for fixing the yarn in the wall, floor or ceiling, Sandback’s sculptures offer a unique aesthetic that helps to stimulate the viewer’s imagination. The exhibition gains a further dimension from the inclusion of several drawings. Always linked to Sandback’s sculptures, these have a twofold function, as both preparation and record. A plan for “Untitled (Blue Line, 11 meters long, Konrad Fischer Gallery, Düsseldorf, 1969)” a drawing from 1995 related to the series of “Broken Line sculptures”, or again, a drawing in black and white pencil on blue paper from 1985 dating from one of his Parisian exhibitions. Parallel to the exhibition, a selection of lithographs, etchings, screenprints, and woodcuts is on view at the gallery bookshop,

Info: Galerie Marian Goodman, 79 rue du Temple, Paris and Librairie Marian Goodman, 66 rue du Temple, Paris, Duration: 8/7-27/10/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.mariangoodman.com