(born in 1935)
Lockblox, 1998, concrete capstones (16 units on the floor, 6 units on stretcher edge spaced by 5 pairs on header edge, all units abutting at edges)

(each) 40 x 20 x 8 cm.
15.7 x 7.9 x 3.1 in.
(overall) 40 x 40 x 148 cm.
15.7 x 15.7 x 58.3 in.

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity, and will be included in the forthcoming Catalogue Raisonne prepared by the Carl Andre & Melissa L. Kretschmer Foundation.

Provenance:
Galerie Tschudi, Zuoz, Switzerland (acquired directly from the artist)
Private Collection, Spain
Private Collection, Europe (acquired from the above in 2014)

Exhibition:
Glarus, Galerie Tschudi, Carl Andre, Antonio Calderara, Alan Charlton, Martin Gerwers, Martina Klein, Richard Long, Niele Toroni Group Show, 1998
Zuoz, Galerie Tschudi, Carl Andre,
Pythagorean Sculptures, 2006 Zuoz, Galerie Tschudi, Carl Andre, 2012

“Up to a certain time I was cutting into things. Then I realized that the thing
I was cutting was the cut. Rather than cut into the material,
I now use the material as the cut in space.’’
David Bourdon, Carl Andre: Sculpture 1959-1977, New York, 1978, p. 19

Composed of 16 solid and rectangular concrete capstones arranged in a simple arithmetic combination on the floor, the present Lockblox by Carl Andre, which dates from 1998, embodies the essence of this quote. The material, size, solidity, rigidity and the unforgiving nature of this work means that it is successfully able to inhabit any space with a strong and imposing presence, and in this way has the power to cut into and define the space, whilst demanding the attention of the viewer.

With his first major retrospective exhibition taking place at the Guggenheim Museum, New York in 1970, Carl Andre found critical acclaim relatively early on in his career. He has since featured in many international exhibitions, including a very recent touring exhibition entitled ‘Carl Andre, Sculpture as place, 1958 – 2010’, which was shown in five different museums around the world and included forty of Andre’s monumental sculptures. He is today regarded as one of the most prominent and influential of Minimal sculptors and his works embody one of the most important tenets of the Minimalist movement; namely that modular repetition can be the basis for artistic exploration of the material world. Two figures who were integral to Andre’s artistic development were the sculptor Constantin Brancusi and the painter Frank Stella. For Andre, both artists appealed to his disposition towards the Minimal through their interest in paring down physical materials or painted depictions to their most elemental and essential forms.

It was during the early 1960s, when Andre was sharing a studio with Frank Stella, whilst also working as a railroad freight brakesman and conductor on the Pennsylvania Railroad, that he began to develop the artistic ideas that would come to define his career and oeuvre. During this time, he started to construct works out of simple and geometric blocks of material, often making use of the types of everyday industrial materials that he encountered during his work in the New York Rail Yards, and placing them in standardised and rhythmic patterns which enabled him to artistically explore spatial relationships. In these sculptures, Andre was careful to arrange and present the materials in a way that distanced them from the forms of their original use, thus placing them in a new context which would prompt the viewer to be made aware of the inherent qualities of the material.
In a way, the arrangement itself of the individual modular units within these works was Andre’s only artistic intervention, and when we look at many of his sculptures, there is a sense that they could conceivably be taken apart and reconstructed in a completely different format if the artist so desired. By approaching sculpture in this manner, Andre deliberately moved away from the more traditional sculptural processes such as carving, where the idea is that a form is revealed by cutting into a block of material, or even the process of creating a form by binding the different parts together using agents such as nails or welds.

Although the present Lockblox was created in the 90s, some time after Andre’s initial explorations of these ideas, it demonstrates his continued interest in them by embodying his additive, rather than reductive approach to sculpture, as well as the preference for building up and assembling modular units so that they are not limited by any binding agents and are instead reliant upon himself as the artist and fabricator.
This artwork is not shy or retiring; it challenges the traditional mode of sculptural representation and offers a new approach to the construction of form and the treatment of material, which succeeds in arresting the attention of the viewer and commanding the space in which it is placed.