Carl Andre
Mnuchin Gallery is proud to announce Carl Andre In His Time. The exhibition will feature 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.
Carl Andre revolutionized sculpture in the 1960s with his flattened, modular works that abandoned verticality— and any accompanying allusions to architecture and the human body— in favor 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 will feature a focused group of these iconic, floor-based sculptures in copper, zinc, aluminum, slate, magnesium, lead, and steel, illustrating Andre’s nuanced exploration of the physical qualities of his materials.
Andre’s work will be contextualized 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. Among the works on view will be a Donald Judd stack and a Sol LeWitt wall drawing.
The exhibition coincides with Andre’s traveling retrospective, Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, organized by Dia:Beacon and currently on view at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid through October 12, 2015. Carl Andre In His Time will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue authored by Alistair Rider, author of the monograph Carl Andre: Things In Their Elements (Phaidon, 2011) and contributor to Dia:Beacon’s exhibition catalogue Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place (2014).
