Carl Andre, the sculptor whose work defined Minimalism, has died. His death was confirmed by his long-time gallery, Paula Cooper. Andre showed in the gallery’s first exhibition in 1968, joining its roster in 1978. Since then, Cooper has organised more than 20 exhibitions of his work, telling the Financial Times she thought his art was ‘truly radical’. Andre’s work, composed of blocks of stone and wood or squares of metal placed along the gallery floor, was first exhibited in 1965 and was included a year later in the seminal Primary Structures exhibition at The Jewish Museum in New York, which introduced Minimalism to the larger public. He was also part of another landmark exhibition, ‘Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form’ curated by Harald Szeemann at Kunsthalle Bern in 1969.
‘Andre redefined the parameters of sculpture and poetry through his use of unaltered industrial materials and innovative approach to language’ Paula Cooper Gallery said in a statement. ‘He created over two thousand sculptures and an equal number of poems throughout his almost seventy-year career, guided by a commitment to pure matter in lucid geometric arrangements.’
Andre’s career was in the ascendency in the 1960s and 70s, with major solo exhibitions including the Guggenheim in New York (1970), the St. Louis Art Museum (1971), Kunsthalle Bern (1975), Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (1975) and National Gallery of Art, Canada (1979). He then did not have a solo museum show in the United States until Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958–2010 opened at Dia:Beacon in Upstate New York in 2014. His legacy is marred by being charged for the murder of his wife, artist Ana Mendieta, in 1985. On the night of her death, Andre called 911 and said, according to a report from the time by The village Voice, ‘What happened was we had … my wife is an artist and I am an artist and we had a quarrel about the fact that I was more, eh, exposed to the public than she was and she went to the bedroom and I went after her and she went out of the window’. Andre was acquitted of her murder in a bench trial – a trial without a jury where the defendant is only tried by a judge – in 1988.
