Alan Saret, the artist known for his influential wire sculpture, has died.
Saret’s brand of minimalism was as much informed by spiritual reflection as it was by mathematics and geometry. He turned to wire as his material of choice in the 1960s, both as thread and meshed sheets. These he would twist and interlace to create great cascading sculpture, each work a flexible counter to the rigid geometric minimalism being made by his peers.
A confident of fellow American sculptor Robert Morris, Serat’s breakthrough came in 1966. ‘Wondering what painting would be like if the space between the threads of the canvas were expanded, I tried stretching chicken wire over frames made of electrical conduit. Fascinated by the potential of the wire mesh alone, I abandoned the frame.’
After graduating from Cornell University with a degree in architecture that year, he studied under Morris at Hunter College in New York. Following a debut solo exhibition at Bykert Gallery in 1968, Serat’s work was featured in group shows Nine in a Warehouse at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (1968) and Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form at Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (1969).
In 1971, Saret participated in the Indian Triennale in New Delhi, remaining in the country for three years ‘exploring the ultimate questions of Self and world that the art had occasioned’, then returning to New York to produce vast organic formed of threaded and looped wire. ‘Shaking can restore life to the work’, he suggested in notes on his work’s conservation, a document that could double as a philosophy. ‘Outer wires should curve naturally. Kinks can be removed by passing the wire through the fingers.’
