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.
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Nevelson's assemblages transcended space and transformed the viewer's perception of art.
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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.
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“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
