Alistair rider

Hardcover | 27.2 x 1.6 x 27.2 cm | 80 pp

Mnuchin Gallery | 2015 | 9780989290968

The exhibition Carl Andre In His Time featured a group of Andre’s seminal early sculptures accompanied by contemporaneous masterworks by leading figures of the period, including John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, and Frank Stella. The book includes an essay by Alistair Rider.

Carl Andre revolutionised sculpture in the 1960s with his flattened, modular works that abandoned verticality - and any accompanying allusions to architecture and the human body - in favour of creating what he famously called “sculpture as place,” explaining, “a place is an area within an environment which has been altered in such a way as to make the general environment more conspicuous.” “Rather than cut into the material,” Andre said, “I now use the material as the cut in space.” Composed of unjoined configurations of identical, mass-produced units, Andre’s works often lay flat on the gallery floor, inviting the viewer to walk directly upon them and radically allowing him or her to experience a sculpture from within the work itself.  This exhibition featured a focused group of these iconic, floor-based sculptures in copper, zinc, aluminium, slate, magnesium, lead, and steel, illustrating Andre’s nuanced exploration of the physical qualities of his materials.

Andre’s work is here contextualised by the paintings and sculptures of his Minimalist contemporaries who were living and working alongside one another in New York in the 1960s.  Exhibited together in such watershed exhibitions as the Jewish Museum’s Primary Structures (1966) and the Whitney Museum’s Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials (1969), these artists were united by their conceptual engagement with geometric abstraction.