Fred Sandback

Fred Sandback - Study of sculpture; interest in building stringed instruments

Fred Sandback was born Frederick Lane Sandback on 29th August 1943 in Bronxville, New York. After attending Williston Academy and an exchange year at the Theodor-Heuss-Gymnasium in Heilbronn, he studied philosophy at the renowned Yale University from 1962 to 1966. In 1966, he began studying sculpture at the Yale School of Art and Architecture - where his teachers Donald Judd and Robert Morris had a great influence on his artistic development - and graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in 1969. In his youth, Fred Sandback was interested in stringed instruments and their construction - a first indication of his later passion for lines and threads. While still a student, he was able to present his early works to Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf and Heiner Friedrich in Munich in 1968, and in 1969, moved to New York, where he held solo exhibitions that same year.

Drawings that can be lived in and walked in

Fred Sandback's art was minimalist from the outset, sufficed with few components and showed no figurative elements. He used red, yellow and blue threads to create his very own interpretations of space, which he liked to refer to as inhabitable drawings. Sandback believed that his installations required and claimed their own fixed space; he valued the impossibility of any movement or displacement of his artworks. He did not want his work to narrate or depict anything, but was interested in directly intervening in an existing space, setting new boundaries and accents. He created window-like structures made of thin acrylic threads, close-meshed grids and three-dimensional cubes, always discreet, never obtrusive, just as much as was necessary to give expression and form to the artist's ideas. Sandback only considered his artworks to be complete when his audience traversed them; the carefully stretched threads served as a kind of coordinate system that set limits to the steps and movements, showing paths and perspectives.

Minimalist art on a grand scale

The artist endeavoured scrupulously to avoid repetition; each of his settings was intended to be unique and create a constellation that the viewer would not find anywhere else in this form. His art was often orientated towards the conditions of the respective exhibition venues and was inextricably linked to its environment. In addition to his room-filling installations, Sandback also created smaller structures that soon enjoyed great popularity among collectors. Today, considerable prices are paid for works by Fred Sandback, the major galleries and museums repeatedly organise large exhibitions of his art, and for a time there was even a museum dedicated to him in Massachusetts. In addition to his installations and sculptures, he also created a large number of prints and drawings, initially in bright colours, later in black, white and grey. 

Fred Sandback ended his life on 23rd June 2003 in New York.