Locks Gallery is pleased to present Louise Nevelson: Sculpture and Collage, on view March 2nd through April 13th, 2012. There will be an opening reception on Friday, March 2nd, from 5:30 to 7:30pm.
Louise Nevelson’s fiercely independent approach to sculpture has become an iconic achievement in postwar art. Working primarily in wood—often found and discarded—the artist’s assemblages create environments of light, shadow, architecture and spatial dynamics. Her stacks of constructed boxes, each with intricate interior spaces became a signature approach. A selection of wood wall constructions and collages (in effect her drawings), shown side-by-side offer insight into her evolving ideas about materials and assemblage. The works on view date from 1957 to 1981 and include a gold sculpture from her important Royal Tide series. Nevelson’s decision to uniformly paint all of her constructions a single color was fully realized by the 1950s—she chose gold after first working only in black, then white. In describing the gold sculptures, she noted with irony and as an immigrant, “They promised that the streets of America would be paved in gold.”
Louise Nevelson was born in Kiev, Russia in 1899 and emigrated to the U.S. at age five. She studied at The Art Students League of New York, painted with Hans Hoffman in Germany, and worked as an assistant for Diego Rivera. She was featured in the U.S. Pavlillion in 1962 and 1976. The subject of retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, in 1967 and 1998, she also had an international traveling restrospective in 1973. Louise Nevelson died in 1988.
