Carl Andre

Walnut Works

“It’s the potentiality of being anything. Once you turn something into something, its universal usage is over.”

Carl Andre, 2013¹

Sadie Coles HQ presents a series of walnut sculptures from the mid-1990s by Carl Andre.  Originally exhibited in the 1995 exhibition ‘New Wood Works’ at Anthony d’Offay Gallery, these pieces are from a cycle of six floor sculptures, each comprised of identically-sized oblongs of walnut. 

In common with much of Andre’s output over a fifty-year career, the works’ principal subject is their own unadorned materiality. Arranged in simple, earthbound configurations, they exude what Andre describes as the “potentiality of being anything”. It is this insistent realness which has occasionally made Andre’s art as problematic as it is iconic. He comments: “My life has been a chorus of: ‘How can you call that art?’”²

Angelune (1995) is formed from twenty-six walnut sections which fan out across the floor in an arc. Like many of Andre’s works in quasi-mathematical arrangements, this elegant arabesque shape mirrors real-life forms, whether a giant eyelash or a curving path. Andre has also cited ancient structures such as Egyptian pyramids or Roman roads as significant inspirations. All the while, his works retain a fundamentally literalist bent, unshackled from context and untransformed. An essential quality of ‘thereness’ prevails, working against against mimesis or metaphor. Accordingly, Andre’s titles are poetic coinages or more descriptive summations – Pitch, Cline (suggesting ‘decline’) – which ultimately resist easy associative interpretation.

Art historian Alistair Rider notes that “wood has always held a very privileged position in [Andre’s] pantheon of materials: his reasoning seems to be that wood is a substance that openly replenishes itself: the cut branch simply grows back”.³ In their disjoined arrangements of infinitely repeatable and replaceable units, moreover, Andre’s walnut sculptures carry the basic sense of provisionality that is inherent to much of his work. The material could, in theory, be gathered up and put to another use. In this sense, Andre – one of the pioneers of Minimalism in the 1960s along with Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt – has long harnessed (and indeed anticipated) the tenets of Conceptualism. 

Andre has long traced his unerring methodology to specific episodes in his life, such as working in the 1960s as a freight brakeman on the Pennsylvania Railroad – an experience that shaped his interest in standardised industrial materials. Most recently, he has pinpointed an even earlier formative moment: 

“What do little kids do? They crawl on the floor and they build with blocks. I just continued to do that for the rest of my life. My father had a workshop in the basement of our house in Quincy, Massachusetts. There was a bin where the wood was stored and there was a bench, which had a box underneath, and all of the non-ferrous metals accumulated there – copper, brass, nickel.”⁴

Carl Andre’s work has been the subject of a number of museum retrospectives, 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; the Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, in 1996; and the Musée Cantini, Marseilles, in 1997. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘@’, Alfonso Artiaco, Naples, Italy, and ‘Carl Andre’ at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas. In 2011, Alistair Rider’s definitive monograph, Things in Their Elements, was published by Phaidon. In 2014, Dia Art Foundation, New York, will host the first major retrospective of his work in North America.

¹ Carl Andre in interview with Barbara Rose, Interview, June/July 2013.

² Carl Andre in interview with Barbara Rose, 2013.

³ Alistair Rider, Carl Andre: Things in Their Elements (London: Phaidon, 2011), p. 240.

⁴ Carl Andre in interview with Barbara Rose, 2013.