A two-part exhibition of sculpture and text pieces by American artist Carl Andre opens this December at Sadie Coles HQ
SMALL FIELDS are a unique group of new works made from either brass plates or steel magnets. The special thing about these sculptures is their size – each unit measures only a few centimetres - so the tiny fields are smallscaled examples of Andre’s familiar formats. Laid out in the gallery, the alternating vertical and horizontal fields transform the space with their surprising scale to make the room feel like an enormous plateau.
SHOOTING A SCRIPT is a project that Andre has been working on for 25 years. The seventeen pages of manuscript, typed (with errors) on an oldfashioned typewriter, represent Andre’s attempt to find a geometric format for the 18 parallel but contradictory eyewitness accounts of a gunfight in Waco, Texas, in 1898. Various characters repeat, with increasing confusion, the violent end of ‘Bran the Iconoclast’ and his mortal enemy Tom Davies. Andre’s attempt to marshal these accounts into the structure of a poem, within a minimal layout, echoes the form of his sculptures but also gives the impression of a music score conveying the cacophony of the witnesses voices.
The original pages of typescript are exhibited at the gallery, and the whole project, SHOOTING A SCRIPT, is published as a limited edition artist’s book in an edition of 78.
For further information please contact the gallery at +44 (0)20 7493 8611 or press@sadiecoles.com