Fred Sandback’s works may at first seem easily overlooked given their slight materiality, as is the case here: a single strand of red acrylic yarn lines stretched closely between two walls as distances from the corner specified in the certificate and instructions that accompany the work. But the yarn itself outlines of planes or volumes, and imaginatively extends through the wall into infinite space. “The volumes defined by these string constructions form the essential elements of the works; the medium could be said to be air.” Sandback also spoke of his works as sculptures, but sculptures without volume, bodies without mass. “Over the years I have preferred the title ‘sculptor.’ I like the groundedness of it, referring back to my early love for the sculpture of Michelangelo, Rodin, and Henry Moore, for example. Early on, though, I left the model of such discrete sculptural volumes for a sculpture which became 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.”
