Born: September 23?, 1899/1900, Kiev
Died: April 17, 1988, New York City
Louise Nevelson was Russian-American sculptor, best known for her abstract vertical wood sculptures.
Born September 23, 1900, in Kyiv, Ukraine, Nevelson studied at the Art Students League in New York City from 1928 to 1930 and with the German painter Hans Hofmann in Munich in 1931. Her diverse works of the 1930s and 1940s show influences ranging from the dynamic contortions of the futurist school to the cool, simplified forms of the Romanian artist Constantin Brancusi’s sculptures. Trips to Mexico and South America inspired a series of terra-cotta works. She began working in wood in the early 1950s, achieving her first major success with Black Majesty (1955, Whitney Museum, New York City), a horizontal arrangement of geometrical wooden forms. In the late 1950s Nevelson began producing her well-known “sculptural walls”-large freestanding arrangements of shallow vertical boxes filled with pieces of wood and miscellaneous objects such as driftwood, wheels, knobs and chair slats. These works, with such evocative titles as Sky Cathedral (1958, Museum of Modern Art, New York City) and Total Obscurity (1962, Pace Gallery, New York City), were usually painted a single colour, notably black, but sometimes white or gold. She later experimented with other materials, such as metal, Plexiglas, plastic, Lucite and enamel. For New York City’s Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church Nevelson created the all-white Chapel of the Good Shepherd (1977-1978).
Shopping Cart
