Fred Sandback
(American, 1943 – 2003) Fred Sandback was an American sculptor whose subtle interventions—taut lengths of acrylic yarn drawn between floor, wall and ceiling—redefined sculpture as “drawing in space.” Dispensing with mass, he used line to articulate planes and volumes, making architecture and perception integral to the work. Born in Bronxville, New York, Sandback earned a…
Fred Sandback
(American, 1943 – 2003)
Fred Sandback was an American sculptor whose subtle interventions—taut lengths of acrylic yarn drawn between floor, wall and ceiling—redefined sculpture as “drawing in space.” Dispensing with mass, he used line to articulate planes and volumes, making architecture and perception integral to the work.
Born in Bronxville, New York, Sandback earned a BA in philosophy at Yale before studying sculpture at the Yale School of Art & Architecture. His first solo exhibitions took place in 1968 at Galerie Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf, and Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich, establishing an approach that favored precision, economy, and the viewer’s spatial experience over objecthood.
A long association with Dia Art Foundation shaped his career. In 1981 Dia inaugurated the Fred Sandback Museum in Winchendon, Massachusetts (active until 1996), and today maintains significant installations at Dia Beacon, where the work’s situational character can be experienced at scale.
Across drawings, prints, and site-responsive installations, Sandback sustained a rigorous inquiry into how the simplest means can transform a room into sculpture. The result is a practice that is at once conceptually exacting and quietly immersive—an enduring benchmark of postwar minimal and post-minimal art.
Fred Sandback´s work has been presented internationally in numerous solo exhibitions and is represented in major public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; British Museum, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Fonds national d’art contemporain, Paris; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art.