Selection of works by the American artist Fred Sandback

David Zwirner is pleased to present a selection of works by the American artist Fred Sandback (1943–2003) that together highlight the artist’s wide-ranging formal vocabulary and his innovative treatment of space. On view at the gallery’s 34 East 69th Street location in New York, the domestically scaled space will allow viewers an intimate engagement with a number of the artist’s signature formats. 

Over the course of more than three decades, Sandback developed a singular, minimal formal vocabulary that elaborated on the phenomenological experience of space and volume with unwavering consistency and ingenuity. Though he employed metal wire and elastic cord early in his career, the artist soon largely dispensed with mass and weight by using acrylic yarn to outline planes and volumes in space. By stretching lengths of yarn horizontally, vertically, or diagonally at different scales and in varied configurations, he created an extensive body of works that inherently address their physical surroundings. 

In his own words, Sandback described his sculpture as being “… less 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.

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

Image: Fred Sandback, Untitled, 1971/1980