Untitled

Sculptures by Fred Sandback are characterized by great restraint, sometimes by a near invisibility. Normality as an indication that a work of art is at least partially linked to the world-at-Iarge also characterizes the work created by at least two generations of artists. At nearly the same time, they developed options for a comprehensive program of reform and modernization. They used materials and finished products as well as industrial methods of manufacturing goods and commodities to exemplify the analogies between social and artistic constructions of reality. The term “sculpture” had lost its validity and serviceability for these artists. They rejected the tradition associated with it, the more so perhaps because their works could have been misunderstood as sculpture made with other means and materials. The singular, elementary nature of the response and position of FS in the art scene of the 1960s and 1970s can be appreciated by taking a look at the proximity and distance of his relationship to these artistic conceptions and ambitions.

As he saw things, the terms “sculpture” and “sculptor” were helpful and illuminating and he used them with deliberate impartiality. The classical designation “sculpture” is thus the foil that highlights the presence and absence of the attributes traditionally identified with the term. For FS the opposition and fusion of work and space are self-evident givens. Both the space or sequence of spaces at hand as well as the materials he employs are his readymades.

-Gianfranco Verna