'"The Point at Which All Ideas Fall Apart”: Fred Sandback’s Grand Illusions' by Thomas Micchelli
2016
There is a small catalogue that accompanied an exhibition of Fred Sandback's sculptures and drawings held in April 2004, almost a year after he died. The catalogue, published by the Upper East Side gallery Zwirner & Wirth, includes two pages of notes written by the artist in the 1970s, which read like a crash course in the paradoxes woven into his incorporeal realm of three-dimensional lines drawn in space:
"There's only a certain amount of control you can have over a situation. I’m interested in working in that area in which the mind can no longer hold on to things. The point at which all ideas fall apart. The inherent mysticism resides […] in wanting to make something as factual as possible and having it turn out just the other way […] the realization that the simplest and most comfortable of perceptions are shadows. A piece made with just a few lines at first appears very purist and geometrical. My work isn’t either one of these things."
Read more at Hyperallergic.