Hamburger Bahnhof presents the first solo museum exhibition in Berlin of pioneering installation artist Fred Sandback (1943 Bronxville, NY – 2003 New York City, NY). “Simple Facts“ features a focused selection of the artist’s installations and conceptual drawings spanning more than three decades of his practice. It marks a significant donation from the Fred Sandback Archive of a series of works originally conceived in 1975 for his exhibition at Kunstraum Munich: 64 variations of a three-part sculpture. They are shown alongside nine installation works highlighting Sandback’s singular, minimal formal vocabulary, and treatment of space.
By stretching single strands of yarn point-to-point to create geometric figures, Sandback has articulated a new form of “drawing in space“. He largely dispensed with mass and weight by using steel rod, elastic cord, and acrylic yarn to outline planes and volumes in space. In reflecting on his practice, Sandback once said: “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… My lines aren’t distillations or refinements of anything. They are simple facts, issues of my activity that don’t represent anything beyond themselves.“
With precision and an unmatched economy of means, Sandback has created iconic sculptures that succeed in altering our perception of visible sculptural objects and the invisible space in which they exist. Therefore, his work lives outside the bounds of temporality, always contemporary, always of the now.
