ENTRY 12.
How the floor of our stone yard in Northern Italy,
filled with alabaster remnants, brought us to Louise Nevelson.
Louise Nevelson, a leading sculptor of the twentieth century, pioneered site-specific and installation art with her monochromatic wood sculptures.
Nevelson's assemblages transcended space and transformed the viewer's perception of art.
She emerged in the art world amidst the dominance of the Abstract Expressionist movement. In her most iconic works, she gathered urban debris to create her assemblages - a process clearly influenced by the precedent of Marcel Duchamp's found object sculptures of the time. Nevelson carefully arranged the found wood in order to historicize the debris within a new, narrative context.
LOUISE
NEVELSON
Born: September 23, 1899, Pereiaslav, Ukraine
Died: April 17, 1988 (age 88 years), New York, NY
Periods: Modern art, Abstract expressionism, Cubism
Influenced by: Alexander Calder, Pablo Picasso, Hans Hofmann, Diego Rivera, Max Ernst, André Masson.
An interest in shadow and space materialized in her first sculptures, introducing a visual language that came to characterize much of her work from the mid 1950s onward.
“Shadow and everything else on Earth is actually moving. Movement - that's in color, that's in form, that's in almost everything. Shadow is fleeting. I arrest it and I give it a solid substance. ” - Louise Nevelson
