The Chinati Foundation welcomes back the special exhibition, Fred Sandback: Sculpture, this Saturday, October 11, during the foundation’s annual Chinati Weekend. The exhibit is a remount of works Sandback first presented at Chinati from 2001–2002.
Situated among the architecture of the U-shaped Army barracks, visitors are given the opportunity to engage with Sandback’s work as it was initially envisaged. The exhibit presents six sculptures constructed of acrylic yarn and three painted wood reliefs (all works Untitled).
Fred Sandback, born in Bronxville, New York, in 1943, was a sculptor internationally known for his minimalist works made from acrylic colored yarn. After earning his B.A. in philosophy from Yale University, he later went on to study sculpture at Yale School of Art and Architecture. Today, his work is permanently on view at Dia:Beacon in New York. Sandback died in 2003, and the Fred Sandback Archive was established in 2007 to maintain and oversee the archival resource on his work.
As a child, Sandback watched Fred, his antique-dealer uncle, and his partner cane chairs and transform logs into naked female figures. Impacted by these early memories, Sandback strung banjos and dulcimers as a teen, later building kayaks and low bows, enjoying archery into adulthood. For a number of summers, Sandback taught young students to make cloth-covered boats, calling the process a “very economical use of materials. Very light and airy.”
But his fascination with sculpture was paramount. Throughout his career, Sandback recalls the indelible impression that the sculptures of Michelangelo, Maillol, Rodin and Brancusi left on him, even referring to his enduring adoration of Giacometti as a “major love affair.”
His fascination with string and cord captured the attention of Donald Judd, one of his early teachers at Yale. Sandback produced his first definitive string structure in 1966 and worked with acrylic yarn, often purchasing it from Walmart, seeking out “the cheapest stuff,” as he noted in a 2001 Chinati Foundation interview. The artist used simple thread to describe a potentially limitless volume and call attention to his viewers’ immediate surroundings. Both Judd and Sandback shared an interest in three-dimensional work that emphasized space and materiality over illusionism. Sandback’s use of delicate yarn to outline space was a departure, however, from the industrial objects favored by Judd. Sandback likens his yarn work to drawing, as the thin lines of thread resemble those made by a No. 2 pencil.
“I am interested in a strong, immediate, and beautiful situation,” Sandback wrote in his draft notes for an exhibition catalogue published by the Kunstraum, Munich, in 1975. Being inspired by and somewhat dependent upon the architectural spaces in which he installed his work, it is no surprise that Sandback found a meaningful connection to both Marfa and Judd’s work. His initial installation of these works at Chinati in 2001 was one of his last exhibits before he died in 2003. In the years since his death, his work continues to be exhibited internationally.
Sandback’s work is, in many senses of the word, lightweight. He often arrived to install his pieces at museums carrying nothing more than a single duffle bag of materials. Existing somewhere between drawing and sculpture, his work’s power to conjure the urgency of attention and shift perception extends far beyond its initial airy and minimal presentation.
Sandback’s main preoccupation—and part of the power of his work—was his immediate surroundings, the here and now. His most characteristic works stretch between different points on the walls, ceilings and floors of the spaces they inhabit, often presenting like a room-sized drawing or slipping in and out of the viewer’s gaze, glasslike and warping their field of vision. Adhering to these ideals—to the power of the here and now—the remounting of his work in this context and time will allow visitors to feel something entirely new.
Nodding to his own work’s malleability and unbridled possibility, Sandback says in his 1986 text Fred Sandback: Sculpture, “The sculptures address themselves to the particular space and time that they’re in, but it may be that the more complete situation that I’m after is only constructed in time slowly … I don’t feel that once a piece is made, then it’s done with. I continue to work with older schemata and formats, and often begin to get what I want out of them only after many reworkings.”
Sandback’s own attitude towards the ephemerality and transience of his sculptures bodes curiously for the remount of his 2001 works. “My three-dimensional pieces are physically unstable—some exist for a day or so and then are finished,” Sandback wrote in 1975 notes from Kunstraum-Munich. “That’s the right scale for me. A piece can always be remade.” In its re-installation, the artist’s enduring hope may be that in encountering it we will find something—our environment, ourselves—anew.
The special exhibition openings of Fred Sandback: Sculpture and Oscar Hagerman: Sillas de México will take place on Saturday, October 11, at 10 a.m., beginning with a champagne toast and opening remarks. Open viewing of the works of Fred Sandback, Oscar Hagerman and the Chinati Foundation Permanent Collection will take place from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. And later, an exhibition talk by Joshua Decter on Fred Sandback will be held at 3:30 p.m. at the Crowley Theater.
Each of these events are free and open to the public. Sandback’s exhibition will remain on view through June 2026.