Zwirner & Wirth and David Zwirner present concurrent exhibitions of sculptures and drawings by the American artist Fred Sandback (1943-2003). Surveying the artist’s uniquely focused career, this will be the first large-scale exhibition of Sandback’s work organized in the United States since it was presented at Dia Center for the Arts, New York in 1996-1997. Known for sculptures that outline imaginary planes and volumes in space with colored yarn, Sandback’s work is informed by a rigorously minimal artistic vocabulary.

This two-part exhibition will trace the development of his practice, with works dating from 1967 to 2003. Though Sandback employed metal and elastic cord in his earliest works, the artist would soon dispense almost entirely with the mass and weight of materials by using acrylic yarn to create sculptures that produce perceptual illusions while also addressing their physical surroundings and the “pedestrian space,” as Sandback called it, of everyday life. Throughout the course of his career, yarn would enable the artist to elaborate on the phenomenological experience of space and volumes with unwavering consistency and ingenuity. As Thomas McEvilley notes, “like a patient and conscientious researcher Sandback made his way through the world of art and space by careful and precise steps—yet found a route that was peculiarly his own and has a certain claim to uniqueness in his overall idea of a sculpture with no inside, no relationship between surface and interior.” The exhibition will examine the broad scope of formal invention that the artist was able to achieve with this restricted idiom of yarn lines in space. Sandback’s sculptural compositions are comprised of lengths of yarn stretched horizontally, vertically, or diagonally in a variety of configurations that include rectangles, triangles, U-shapes, and floor-to-ceiling vertical lines. The works on view range from smaller-sized wood wall reliefs to constructions that encompass entire rooms, thus demonstrating how the artist was able to create this signature vocabulary of forms in different combinations and scales.

David Zwirner exhibits a selection of Sandback’s large-scale sculptures. These works range from wall reliefs to installations that inhabit and activate entire rooms. These include two impressive works that are on public view for the first time: Untitled (Sculptural Study, Seventeen-part Right-angled Construction) (conceived in 1985), which consists of 17 parallel L-shaped lines of red yarn; and Broadway Boogie Woogie (Sculptural Study, Twenty-eight Part Vertical Construction) (conceived in 1991), named after Mondrian’s well-known painting and composed of 28 vertical lengths of acrylic yarn in red, yellow, and blue that extend from floor to ceiling. These constructions create unexpected perceptual shifts as they facilitate a three-dimensional experience of planes and colors. Pamela M. Lee has noted how this work “effectively divides and multiplies the viewer’s field of vision through the logic of parallax; and the body’s coordination in space hence dramatizes the ambivalent relation to interior and exterior Sandback claimed for his work.”2 The large-scale sculptures thus exemplify the artist’s own description of his work as ”...less a thing-in-itself, more of a diffuse interface between myself, my environment, and others peopling that environment, built on thin lines that left enough room to move through and around. Still sculpture, though less dense, with an ambivalence between exterior and interior. A drawing that is habitable.”

Zwirner & Wirth present work by the artist from the 1960s and 70s. These include a selection of Sandback’s earliest sculptures made with metal and elastic cord.