NEW YORK—The Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Carl Andre, on view at 534 West 21st Street. The exhibition will consist of sculptures made of aluminum ingots and Australian hardwood, as well as an early Xerox copy of a scrapbook entitled Passport, which Andre calls “a 1960 sampling of the state of my mind.” The exhibition will run from 22 October to 30 November, 2002.

Both aluminum ingots and Australian hardwood timbers are additions to the list of standardized, unaltered materials Andre has been using as the matière première of his sculpture for almost 40 years. The ingot, an oblong metal casting used for easy handling and recasting, is an Andre particle par excellence by virtue of being a commercially available unit of material. As the artist once said: “I believe in using the materials of society in forms the society does not use.”

Following a basic structural principle that has governed Andre’s sculpture since the 1960s, neither the ingots nor the wood timbers are carved or deformed in any way. They are placed on the floor in characteristically straightforward geometric configurations. The viewer’s attention focuses alternately on the simplicity of the array and on the volume, mass and properties of the material. Ingots and timbers are concrete units of matter reordered in space in intellectually and perceptually lucid ways.

Also on view is a Xerox copy of the 1960 scrapbook Passport, composed of collages, texts and photographs. With a wide array of visual and textual references, from Andre’s personal life to historical figures such as Byron, Emerson and Sir Walter Raleigh, Passport forms a pictographic archive of Andre’s thought at the beginning of the 1960s.

Carl Andre was born September 16, 1935, in Quincy, Massachusetts. From 1951 to 1953, he attended the Phillips Academy, Andover, with Frank Stella and Hollis Frampton (with whom he shared a lasting interest in poetry). In 1957, he settled in New York and began shortly thereafter to create wood sculptures influenced by Brancusi.

Andre’s first one-person show was held in 1965 at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, and the following year his work was included in Kynaston McShine’s and Lucy Lippard’s seminal exhibition Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum. He was, with Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Robert Morris, one of the leading Minimalists. In the 1970s, the artist created large installations, such as 144 Blocks and Stones (1973) for the Portland Center for the Visual Arts, Oregon, and outdoor works such as Stone Field Sculpture (1977) in downtown Hartford.

Andre’s work has been the subject of several retrospectives, most notably at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1970; the Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, Texas, in 1978; the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1978; the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, in 1987; the Haus Lange und Haus Esters, Krefeld and the Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, in 1996; and the Musée Cantini, Marseilles, in 1997. He lives in New York.

For more information, please contact the gallery: (212) 255-1105 or
info@paulacoopergallery.com