Deploying light, shadow, scale and gravity, Fred Sandback’s work creates striking perceptual effects in response to the surrounding architecture. Using commercial acrylic yarn, Sandback traces the space between different points on floors, ceilings, and walls, creating shapes by outlining planes or volumes and constructing the illusion of a pane of glass or shimmering lines of color. Working, as here, with acrylic yarn to delineate or bifurcate three-dimensional space, he creates volumetric forms using the most minimal of means. By stretching single strands of yarn point-to-point to create geometric figures, Sandback’s nearly intangible objects nevertheless amount to precise and subtle delineations of pictorial planes and architectural volumes. The sculpture may even be said to inhabit the room where it is installed. Some principal characteristics of sculpture, such as weight and mass, are displaced entirely. Instead, we have lines in space, materialized as pure color, that manage to redraw our relationship to the room we’re standing in. For other examples of Sandback’s appropriation of sometimes ignored spaces such as corners, see the examples from the show WallCeilingFloor, the catalog for which may be found in the Publications section of the website.
