Often momentary, elusive, and always absolutely real the Minimalist sculptures by American artist Fred Sandback (1943–2003) create a complex mixture of lines, planes, and volumes that seem astonishingly present and entirely illusory. Colorful acrylic yarns are strung between ceiling, floor, walls, and corners of an exhibition space, giving the viewer occasion to pause, creating magical boundaries and volumes that one is able to traverse. Sharply delineated lines seem like the edges of glass planes, or cause the space to reverberate like the strings of an instrument. Sandback himself referred to his sculptures operating in pedestrian space, acknowledging both the viewer's movement through a space and as something to be engaged actively. Sandback's works of art have been correctly described as "nomadic", his installations happen in the here and now, requiring the viewer to physically and mentally determine a standpoint.
The exhibition was curated by Christiane Meyer-Stoll in close colloboration with Amy Baker Sandback and will tour to the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, and the capcMusée d'art contemporain, Bordeaux.
On the occasion of the exhibition a catalogue will be published in German and English with about 300 illustrations and with essays by Yve-Alain Bois, Thomas McEvilley, Thierry Davila and Christiane Meyer-Stoll, texts and interviews by Fred Sandback, statements on Fred Sandback by Jean-Philippe Billarant, Olafur Eliasson, Virginia Dwan, Heiner Friedrich, Tobias Ostrander, David Rabinowitch, Richard Tuttle, Gianfranco Verna etc. and an extensive chronology.