Carl Andre

Ace Gallery, Los Angeles
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 2011

Beverly Hills, Ace Gallery, zinc, October - February 2007

This work is in excellent condition. Irregularities in the patina are inherent to the nature of the medium and intended by the artist. There are a very small number of minor surface scuffs and rubs evident upon close inspection as is to be expected from the nature of the work's execution and display.
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As part of one of the artist’s most iconic bodies of work, Carl Andre’s exquisitely gleaming 81 Ace Zinc Square is a fundamentally discrete yet enduringly monumental metallic force. As an experiential sculpture this significant work summons the beholder to an arena that is both ancient and modern; Andre conjures the natural laws of geometry and numbers, materialized through the raw metals of the earth to create a masterpiece of Minimalism.  Across a delicate yet persistently ordered linear format of a perfected square grid the artist perfectly articulates the principles of reduction, simplicity, repetition and clarity that underpin the revolutionary artistic movement of which he remains a firm pioneer. With its elegant utilization of raw, polished factory materials, the present work exemplifies the revolutionary achievements Andre has made in redefining the medium of sculpture.

It was in the late 1960s that Andre produced his first metal grid works; a simplistic gesture which reconfigured our conceptions of sculpture in their radical placement across the gallery floor and in the invitation for viewers to walk over them. Manifesting themselves in lived space, they have a unique participatory dimension that has altered our perceptions of the function of sculpture within the art historical canon. In his choice of materials Andre refers to the periodic table, the fundamental metals and elements that make up all matter, elements which give life.  Realized in 81 equal parts, arranged as 9 rows of 9 squares, 81 Ace Zinc Square continues this profound sculptural legacy, adhering to the strict laws of square numbers and expressing the proportional laws of mathematics that guide our comprehension of nature.

Andre’s rigidly organized floor-bound grids are aligned within a strain of historically important artists working with the principles of geometric abstraction, important figures such as Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich. Whilst Andre came to be influenced by Minimalist sculptors, such as Donald Judd and Robert Morris, having started his career making sculpture in the studio of Frank Stella, the influence of the painter’s line and concentric grid work is not to be overlooked. Andre described Stella's approach to painting: "He treated a painting as a work to be accomplished by a consistent rigorous application entirely across a surface of the canvas ... breaking down a form into elements and then combining them." (Exh. Cat. London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Carl Andre, 1978, n.p.) This basic idea is a tenet of Andre's Minimal sculpture, most perfectly expounded across the brilliant surfaces of his flat, floor-based tile pieces such as 81 Ace Zinc Square.

These materials and methods of construction can also be associated with the artist’s years spent working on the Pennsylvania Railroad in the early 1960s, where identical units could conceivably be deconstructed and reassembled in different formats. This interest in the properties of industrial elements can also be linked to his wider political outlook and commitment to Marxism, which led him to participate in artists’ strikes and other industrial actions in the late 1960s. Andre eschews decoration and craftsmanship, choosing to simply arrange the metal plates systematically with the repetitive labor of a factory worker on a production line. When interviewed in 1970 he claimed: “The forms of my work have never particularly interested me. What has been my search really is for a material, a particle of a material. It’s finding a material or a unit of material like a brick of the right size and the right shade and density and so forth – from finding this particle, I would combine it with others to make a work." (the artist cited in James Meyer, ed., Cuts: Texts 1959–2004, Massachusetts, 2005, p.99).

Andre’s approach to sculpture is inherently additive in nature and is based upon multiplication. As evidenced perfectly in 81 Ace Zinc Sqaure, the artist considers sculpture as a revelation that is not enacted through cuts into a block of material or bound by agents such as nails or welds, but rather built up and assembled with units, beautifully standardized in form and measurement. In this he gracefully elevates industrial systems to new levels of refined beauty; a quiet revolution that has changed the course of art history.