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Lot Essay
A single saffron line traces its way through space in Fred Sandback’s Untitled. The installation is elegant, weightless, a streak of flame across the ether, and a phenomenological experience of unknowable forces. Created in 1971, the work is an early example of Sandback’s elastic cord sculptures, which he began in 1967. ‘A line,’ said Sandback, ‘has direction—a point of origin and a point of termination. A line is also a discrete entity which exists altogether at the same time’ (F. Sandback, quoted in F. Malsch and C. Meyer-Stoll (eds.), Fred Sandback, Berlin 2015, p. 89).
Born in 1943, Sandback first studied philosophy at Yale University before entering the Yale School of Art and Architecture in 1966. There, his rotating cast of visiting instructors included Donald Judd and Robert Morris, whose conceptual underpinnings greatly influenced the young artist. Like his Minimalist forebears, Sandback saw his work as autonomous and anti-illusory. While ‘illusionistic art refers you away from its factual existence toward something else’, he explained, his sculptures are profoundly in and of their own environments, and his works from the 1970s in particular were conceived with specific locations in mind (F. Sandback quoted ibid., p. 88). For the artist, currently the subject of a solo exhibition at the Fondation CAB in Brussels, art was meant to address an existence rooted in the real. ‘There isn't an idea which transcends the actuality of the pieces,’ he noted. ‘The actuality is the idea’ (F. Sandback, 'Notes', Flash Art, No. 40, March-May 1973, p. 14).
Born in 1943, Sandback first studied philosophy at Yale University before entering the Yale School of Art and Architecture in 1966. There, his rotating cast of visiting instructors included Donald Judd and Robert Morris, whose conceptual underpinnings greatly influenced the young artist. Like his Minimalist forebears, Sandback saw his work as autonomous and anti-illusory. While ‘illusionistic art refers you away from its factual existence toward something else’, he explained, his sculptures are profoundly in and of their own environments, and his works from the 1970s in particular were conceived with specific locations in mind (F. Sandback quoted ibid., p. 88). For the artist, currently the subject of a solo exhibition at the Fondation CAB in Brussels, art was meant to address an existence rooted in the real. ‘There isn't an idea which transcends the actuality of the pieces,’ he noted. ‘The actuality is the idea’ (F. Sandback, 'Notes', Flash Art, No. 40, March-May 1973, p. 14).