Description:
two thin, white diagonal lines in center of blue-green paper
Label Text:
“I’m full of thoughts (more or less). My work isn’t.
It’s not a demonstration of an idea either. It’s an actuality.”
– Fred Sandback
A native of Bronxville, New York, Fred Sandback attended the Williston Academy (now the Williston Northampton School) in nearby Easthampton, MA from 1957 to1961. He subsequently studied in Germany and at Yale University, where he studied sculpture under Minimalist artists Donald Judd and Robert Morris. Sandback is known for his ephemeral sculptures made from acrylic yarn. The taut yarn strings – often stretching from floor to ceiling, ceiling to wall, or wall to floor – create delicate and playful forms that change the way a viewer sees, perceives, and moves about the space. Sandback’s yarn constructions are like drawings in space – lines liberated from the confines of paper.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Sandback translated his spatial ideas from three to two dimensions using the visual and technical capabilities unique to printmaking. Appearing to be iterations of his sculptures, Sandback’s prints actually present singular free-floating lines in a reciprocal interaction with the whole sheet of paper. This is seen in Sandback’s lithograph For Matthias Ignaz, in which the artist printed the blue-green negative space right to the paper’s edge and leaves only the subtle white lines unprinted and exposed. Both elements are of equal importance: the “space” of the paper’s colored expanse and the lithographic line, whose fuzzy character curiously alludes to the tactile quality of his three-dimensional yarn lines.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+1992.39.3 |
