Blue Day-glo Corner Piece

Executed in 1968, Blue Day-glo Corner Piece is an elegant elastic cord sculpture from Fred Sandback’s early oeuvre. Designed specifically to occupy the corner of a room, the work demonstrates Sandback’s ability to delineate and bifurcate interior space through an extraordinary economy of means: here, a quadrilateral outline almost acts as a window, transforming the emptiness it frames. Created using thin strands of cord and stainless steel and coloured in a range of Day-glo hues, the Corner Pieces describe volumes that are potentially limitless, subject to as many variations as there are angles from which to view the sculpture. In doing so, these works make visible the volume that is traditionally hidden inside a sculpture, and render tangible surfaces apparently immaterial. ‘Surfaces seem to imply that what’s interesting is either in front of them or behind them’, the artist explains. ‘Interiors are elusive. You can’t ever see an interior’ (F. Sandback, quoted in Fred Sandback, Munich 1975, pp. 11-12). Often cited as a forerunner of installation art, Sandback toys with our spatial awareness by highlighting the invisible volumes and densities that silently constitute the zones we inhabit.