Fred Sandback

David Zwirner is pleased to present a selection of works by American artist Fred Sandback that together highlight his wide-ranging formal vocabulary and treatment of space. The exhibition will be on view at the gallery’s 34 East 69th Street location in New York, where the domestically scaled interior will allow viewers an intimate engagement with a number of the artist’s signature formats. 

Over the course of decades, Sandback developed a singular, minimal formal vocabulary that elaborated on the phenomenological experience of space and volume with unwavering consistency and ingenuity. He largely dispensed with mass and weight by using steel rod, elastic cord, and acrylic yarn to outline planes and volumes in space, creating an extensive body of works that inherently address their physical surroundings. 

In his own words, Sandback described his sculpture as being “less of a thing-in-itself, more of a diffuse interface between myself, my environment, and others peopling that environment, built of thin lines that left enough room to move through and around. Still sculpture, though less dense, with an ambivalence between exterior and interior. A drawing that is habitable.”¹

This will be the seventh solo presentation of Sandback’s work at David Zwirner. The gallery’s first exhibition was on view at Zwirner & Wirth in 2004, then located in the adjacent building at 32 East 69th Street.

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^{Learn more about the Fred Sandback Archive}

¹ Fred Sandback, in Here and Now: Fred Sandback. Exh. bro. (Leeds, UK: Henry Moore Institute, 1999), n.p. 

Image: Installation view, Fred Sandback, David Zwirner, New York, 2022