Carl Andre and the Konrad Fischer Galerie are connected by an intensive collaboration and friendship that is existing for more than 50 years. In 1967 Konrad Fischer opened his gallery with a floor piece by the American, New York-based artist, at the same time his first European solo exhibition. Since then, Carl Andre has radically changed the concept of sculpture with his extensive body of work.
With the current exhibition, Konrad Fischer Galerie presents his work Cedar Solid, created in 1982 for documenta 7. Consisting of 96 wooden blocks of Western Red Cedar standing upright and close together, each measuring 90 x 30 x 30 cm, it forms a solid cuboid. In contrast, his sculpture Cedar Rotor, created in 2002, uses the same blocks of wood standing vertically to form an arch that swings from the wall into the gallery space. Carl Andre commented on his work in 1982: "In a time obsessed with change, I am obsessed with invariance"
For his Belgica group of works, Andre combines zinc panels with cubes of Belgian Blue Limestone. The length of the flat zinc elements is twice the edge length of the stone cubes. The different structures created from this form partly closed structures, partly open grids.
In Andre's 1989 work Tetranome, a uniform field of 50 x 50 cm copper plates is regularly interrupted by narrow strips of various metals - zinc, lead, copper, and steel.
Poems have always occupied an important place in Carl Andre's work. The appearance of the texts from the early 1960s is largely shaped by the typewriter he uses, while handwritten sheets are also produced in parallel. From this time on, Carl Andre experimented with the first Xerox copying machines and reproduced his poems in this way. The exhibition shows a selection of his poems from the years 1958 - 1972.
Carl Andre's work has been shown in numerous major solo and group exhibitions, most recently in a retrospective at the Dia:Beacon, New York (2014 - 2016), which has been on view at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and the MoCA Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. His works are in public collections such as, among others, the MoMA Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Tate Modern, London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Ludwig Museum in Cologne.
