Fred Sandback

MCA Denver dedicated its entire building to the acrylic yarn sculptures of American artist Fred Sandback, which he conceived over the course of his career. Sandback’s sculptures rely upon the most minute of gestures, colored yarn strung taut to bifurcate rooms and create shapes—yet they seem to articulate monumental ideas about how we perceive and experience space. Conceived as a counterpart to MCA Denver’s previous exhibition Another Victory Over the Sun, which blacked out all natural light from the building, allowing the art to stand out against the architecture, this exhibition works with the museum’s architecture in an entirely opposite way. Sandback’s work shines light on the museum’s spaces with its own minimal, physical presence. Approaching invisibility or immateriality, Sandback’s sculptures are as bare and refined as is materially possible, but they define, cut, mold, shape, re-orient and divide the space. His work is nothing but string—and everything that surrounds it.

Fred Sandback was born in 1943 in Bronxville, New York and died in 2003 in New York. This was the artist's first exhibition in the western United States. After receiving a BA in philosophy at Yale University, he studied sculpture at Yale School of Art and Architecture. In 1981 the Dia Art Foundation initiated and maintained a museum of Sandback's work, the Fred Sandback Museum in Winchendon, Massachusetts, which was open until 1996.