Untitled (sculptural study, three-part construction)

Fred Sandback was a major figure in American minimal and conceptual sculpture. After receiving a B. A in philosophy at Yale University, he studied sculpture at Yale School of Art and Architecture and began exhibiting his work in the late 1960s.

It was Sandback who most convincingly responded to a criticism from Rosalind Krauss that the theatricality of objects that require a human presence inevitably makes the work allusive to the figure and the fact that the objects altered from different points of view made them illusions. Allusion and illusion were the two critical elements that the Minimalists sought to exclude from their work. Sandback pointed out that the key to understanding the importance of anti allusion and illusion was that the sculpture is complete to itself and never points away from the object to any other object in the world. The fact that a viewer might be immersed in the space of the object or that as they move around the space different perspectives may be experienced is entirely to do with the thing itself and is not at all referential.