Lawrence Markey Inc.

FRED SANDBACK Drawing and Sculpture

at Lawrence Markey
April 8–May 8, 2004

Lawrence Markey is pleased to announce our upcoming exhibition of work by Fred Sandback, the seventh one-person exhibition of Sandback's work at Lawrence Markey Gallery, since the gallery's innaugural exhibition in 1990. There will be a concurrent exhibition of Sandback's work at Zwirner & Wirth Gallery, 32 East 69th Street, New York.

This exhibition at Lawrence Markey will feature drawings by Sandback, along with a sculpture made from his signature material of woolen yarn, which Sandback created and exhibited at our gallery in 2001.

The line is a means to mediate the quality or timbre of a situation, and has a structure which is quick and abstract and more or less thinkable, but it's the tonality or, if you want, wholeness of a situation that is what I'm trying to get at. My intrusions are usually modest, perhaps because it seems like it's that first moment when things start to coalesce that is interesting. -Fred Sandback

Richard Field. "Fred Sandback Drawings and Prints", Fred Sandback Sculpture, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven and Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, 1991:

It is the irony of many of Sandback's drawings that they are the only permanent - one could say the only physical- record of his sculptures. They work in tandem not only with the viewer's prior experience and memories of the sculpture, but also with the photographic reproductions of the installations. Yet, his drawings are not merely preparatory sketches or records, but independent works with a life of their own, functioning on their own terms. If, in a three ⁄dimensional setting, a thread may extract a plane that is uncannily both thread and space, in a drawing, a line may suddenly evoke a space that denies the paper's surface, extracting a mental or conceptual space where there was only flatness. And when one set of lines plays against another (even when two lines oppose a single line) Sandback compounds the mental game. ...Sandback's works on paper are absolutley beguiling: calling attention to the whole question of how one distinguishes between figure and ground, art and setting, they give another meaning to the notion of sitespecificity. ...Sandback's drawings reinforce one's sense that he is above all interested in exploring the essence of space as the signifier of human thought. By probing the intersices between flatness and illusion in such subtle (and minimalist) ways, he succeeds in isolating the very moment of human involvement - a moment precisely concurrent with the recognition of space.