Black acrylic yarn; situational: spatial relationships established by the artist
Fred Sandback’s sculptures outline planes and volumes in space. Though he employed metal wire and elastic cord early in his career, the artist soon dispensed with mass and weight by using acrylic yarn to create works that address their physical surroundings, the ‘pedestrian space,’ as he called it, of everyday life. By stretching lengths of yarn horizontally, vertically, or diagonally at different scales and in varied configurations, the artist developed a singular, minimal formal vocabulary that elaborated on the phenomenological experience of space and volume with unwavering consistency and ingenuity. The present work comprises 21 strands of black acrylic yarn arranged to form seven freestanding triangles. The use of multiple repeated forms was a device that Sandback often employed throughout his practice, beginning with his early works from the 1960s. While he created a number of works that made use of a single triangular structure, the use of multiple repeated triangular configurations was rare, and this is one of only two examples.
