JUNE – FRED SANDBACK – SYDNEY

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. That 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, 2020