FRED SANDBACK
FRED SANDBACK
ENQUIRE ABOUT THE ARTIST
The line is a whole, an identity, for a particular place and time.
– Fred Sandback
Fred Sandback’s work, more clearly than any other artwork I know, speaks to the complexity of simultaneous presence and absence. The dis-equilibrium that these ethereal drawings evoke in us remind me most recently, at an experiential level at least, of Richard Serra’s monumental “Torqued Ellipses”. How odd that Sandback’s whispering haikus are capable of matching the visceral jolt of tonnes of Corten steel.
Viewers’ tentative circumnavigation of Sandback’s delicate sculptures speaks not so much of a fear of entanglement in the delicate thread but exposes their intuition of some real but indiscernible presence in the implied plane, as palpable as that of glass. As viewers we become almost hyper-aware of our position vis-à-vis the sculptures. Everything slows as we adjust to this newly attuned sense of our extremities, our edge, our own spatial implications.
FEATURED WORKS
Increasingly, consensus suggests that this is a time for listening. We have reached a moment when bombast and white noise must be completely tuned out, a time when ideas and imagination must prevail over ideology and ignorance.
I have never wanted to have a gallery that pontificates about notions of the socio-political – there are enough already. All I want is to offer work that respectfully asks for quiet and consideration – that addresses our senses with the ambition of heightening them.
There are few artists whose work is capable of eliciting the kind of outstanding recalibration of our faculties as do the sculptures of Fred Sandback. Using the most modest of means, Sandback’s hushed and distilled works elevate feeling and perception over insistence and opinion.
If his sculptures demonstrate that some barriers we erect are an illusion, they also serve to remind us, that whether real or imagined, we are all affected by them, albeit some more radically than others. Some may be in plain sight and others invisible but no less felt. Fred Sandback’s sculptures invite us up to, and at times across these thresholds. The encounters we have with his work are discreet, open, and highly personal. They remind us about our own edge, and heighten our awareness is a timely gift.
In a way they are to vision what listening is to sound. They request a kind of active looking that goes beyond vision and they do this whilst arousing feeling and perception and silencing the bombast and white noise.
– Andrew Jensen
EXHIBITIONS
Fred Sandback was born in the Bronx in 1943, and sadly passed away in 2003. He studied at the Williston Academy in Massachusetts from 1957-1961, and followed this with a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Yale University in 1967. A couple years later in 1969, Sandback graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from the Yale School of Art and Architecture. During his studies, he rubbed elbows with other well-known American artists Donald Judd and Robert Morris who were also at Yale.
He was sponsored by the Dia Art Foundation of New York, which led to the establishment of a museum for Sandbeck’s work; The Fred Sandback Museum in Menchendon, Massachusetts, which closed in 1996. The Dia:Beacon in New York still has his work permanently on show, and his work can be found in other notable collections such as New York’s MoMA and Guggenheim, The Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, The Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the Musee National d’Art Moderne in Paris, France.
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FRED SANDBACK : OBANGSAEK