Louise Nevelson

Private Collection

“But when I fell in love with black, it contained all color. It wasn't a negation of color. It was an acceptance. Because black emcompasses all colors. Black is the most aristocratic color of all. The only aristocratic color. For me this is the ultimate. You can be quiet and it contains the whole thing. There is no color that will give you the feeling of totality. Of peace. Of greatness. Of quietness. Of excitement. I have seen things that were transformed into black that took on just greatness. I don't want to use a lesser word. Now if it does that for things I've handled, that means that the essence of it is just what you call-alchemy” – Louise Nevelson

One of the most celebrated and innovative female artists of her time, Louise Nevelson’s monumental, monochromatic, found object sculptures have stunned and captivated viewers for decades. While she began her career in the 1930s, it wasn’t until her 1958 exhibition Moon Garden Plus One at Grand Central Moderns Gallery in New York that Nevelson received critical acclaim for her work. Covering every wall, hanging from the ceiling and stacked on top of one another with an almost Baroque flair of excess, Nevelson’s sculptures enveloped visitors, establishing the “environment” as a genre of art that fused notions of a communal spatial being with that of the individual and personal self.

The present work, Moon Garden Plus One, executed in 1958 is a sculpture that epitomizes the artist's  famous style. To create her magnificent sculptures, Louise Nevelson collected discarded objects, assembled them and painted them all black. Through this technique, the artist deprived these wooden pieces from their original meaning, giving them a new identity. Facing Nevelson’s ambodied assemblages, the viewer is confronted with materiality and the sense that they have been transported into the artist’s private sphere; a real place experienced through Nevelson’s conceptual recreation of it.