In the archive that was late-20th-century art, Fred Sandback (1943-2003) is usually cross-filed under Minimalism and Conceptualism. His sculptures, composed of a few lengths of yarn or wire stretched taut, are materially spare. They are based on one driving idea: to create art that is object-free but perceptually solid and present.
Sandback himself resisted association with both movements. He found the thinking too abstract and prescriptive, and he didn't see his own art as particularly reductive. How he did see it can be discerned, perhaps, in a pair of related Manhattan gallery shows, at David Zwirner in Chelsea and Zwirner & Wirth on the Upper East Side. From them two impressions of Sandback's sculpture emerge: that it is primarily an optical experience, and that it can be a disconcertingly intense theatrical experience.
Read more at The New York Times.