Spray paint, cardboard and wood, collage on panel
inch 57.09 x 46.06 / cm 145×117
1974
NOTES:
Signed and dated, down, “Louise Nevelson – 74”.
On the back label by The Pace Gallery of New York and Galerie HM of Bruxelles.
PROVENANCE:The Pace Gallery, New York.
Galerie HM, Bruxelles.
Discover the video of the artwork (right-click on the link and select “open link in another browser window”) https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ZzpEPZD5NgY
Louise Nevelson. A Pioneer of Upcycling
In this work, Louise Nevelson uses old materials—cardboard, scrap wood, and chair frames—which she assembles to create a geometric structure.
Nevelson, who arrived in America as a child in 1905, fleeing the Tsarist pogroms, is a pioneer not only as a female artist in a male-dominated world, but also for her use of recycled materials at a time when the work of art was still shrouded in an aura of uniqueness.
She has loved wood since childhood, when her grandfather in Russia owned forests and her father in Maine worked as a lumberjack and later as a furniture maker. Louise, who arrived in New York at a very young age, is drawn to objects that tell a story, such as furniture, which she can reassemble into a composition, giving them new life. These are objects found on the street or on beaches, taken apart and reassembled into frontal structures. By losing their function, they become pure forms that accumulate and repeat, charging themselves with energy.
The theatre of memory
Time is intertwined with space in Louise Nevelson’s assemblages, as in this one presented by Studio Guastalla. Using pieces of wood retrieved from joiners’ workshops or wherever the artist was able to source material, Nevelson bestowed a new spiritual life on it, quite different from the purpose the fragments had been created for. “I reconstruct the dismembered world into a new harmony”, said the artist, subjecting the salvaged objects to a preparatory ritual, almost as if wishing to decontaminate them from the outside world, since if art is everywhere – so that an old table leg can become part of an artwork – it is the creative mind that transforms the object into creation. Thus time, concentrated in the memory that the fragments of the past carry with it, is intertwined with space, with the rhythmical play of solids and vacuums, light and shadow, that give life to Nevelson’s works, producing a theatre of memory.