An expansive presentation of works by Carl Andre, marking one year since the artist’s death, will open at both gallery locations in January 2025. Andre created over two thousand sculptures and an equal number of poems throughout his almost seventy-year career, redefining the parameters of sculpture through the use of uniform industrial materials and poetry through an innovative approach to language. The exhibition will demonstrate the breadth, range, and scale of Andre’s sculptural language through alternating horizontality and verticality, levity and mass.

Three monumental works will be installed in the main gallery at 534 West 21st Street. Breda (1986), produced from ninety-nine blocks of Belgian blue limestone, was first exhibited out of doors in the Hague as part of Andre’s 1987 retrospective at the Haags Gemeentemuseum. Rise (2011) similarly combines the vertical and the horizontal with a row of enormous steel plates bent at a right-angle, extending out from and facing the wall to create a semi-enclosed space. Ferox (1982), a triangular multi-plate floor sculpture of hot-rolled steel projecting outwards from a corner, will complete the trio.

Twenty-Eight Red Brick Line (1968), in the smaller gallery, was included in Paula Cooper Gallery’s inaugural exhibition in 1968 and is a testament to the enduring radicality of Andre’s sculpture. Accompanying the sculpture are poems that were gifted by Andre to his friend Hollis Frampton, the writer and filmmaker who was both an important supporter and major influence on Andre’s work. Through inventive, playful, and often humorous arrangements of letters, Andre’s poems transform a reader’s understanding of language as material.

A Memorial to After Ages (1983), a large-scale sculpture in Quincy granite, will be installed at 521 West 21st Street. Andre carefully selected his materials with regard to their geographic origin and these blocks of stone quarried in his hometown of Quincy, MA, held a particular significance for him. Additional early works formerly owned by Frampton will complement the sculpture: collages of found printed matter from the late 1950s that predict Andre’s technique of cutting and arranging materials, and the hand-carved acrylic Negative Sculpture (1958), one of Andre’s earliest extant sculptural works made before he definitively abandoned the carving of materials.

Merrymount (1980), a stepped pyramid of Western red cedar timbers, will be installed in the vitrine gallery at 529 West 21st Street. This work was first shown at the ICA in Boston on the last leg of Andre’s touring retrospective that originated at the Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, in 1978.

A Catalogue Raisonné of Carl Andre Sculpture is currently in preparation by The Carl Andre and Melissa L. Kretschmer Foundation and Cahiers d’Art Institute, with the support of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, and Konrad Fischer Galerie, Düsseldorf/Berlin.

Carl Andre (b. Quincy, MA, 1935, d. New York, NY, 2024) completed studies at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA, served in the army and travelled in Europe, then settled in New York City in 1957. From 1960 to 1964 Andre worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad, an inseparable experience from his evolution as a sculptor. Immediate acclaim followed Andre’s one-person exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, in 1965, and he participated in several landmark exhibitions of that decade, such as Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors, Jewish Museum, New York (1966), Documenta 4, Kassel, Germany (1968), and Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form—Works/Concepts/Processes/Situations/Information, Kunsthalle Bern (1969). In 1970 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, presented the first retrospective of his work. Alongside numerous public commissions and one-person exhibitions, Andre’s career includes large-scale surveys organized by the Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin (1978, touring internationally through 1980), Krefeld Haus Lange/Haus Esters and Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, Germany (1996), Musée Cantini, Marseille (1997), Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Germany (2011), and Dia: Beacon (2014). A one-person exhibition, Carl Andre: Between Sculpture and Poetry, recently travelled from the Daegu Art Museum in South Korea to The Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in Japan (2023–2024).