January 9 to February 8, 2025 Paula Cooper Gallery NY, NY
Paula Cooper’s winter presentation of Carl Andre stretched across the gallery’s three West 21st Street spaces, quietly marking a year since the artist’s death and reminding New York how much of our sculptural eyesight he trained. The installation moved with Andre’s usual economy: materials set down, not fussed over; form arising from count and contact.
At 534, three monumental works established the terms. Breda (1986) laid out Belgian blue limestone blocks with the finality of civic paving, while Rise (2011) bent steel plates out from the wall to create a shallow enclosure, half alcove, half barricade. Ferox (1982) pushed hot-rolled steel from a corner in a triangular advance, a reminder that “floor piece” in Andre’s hands can feel like a verb.
The show widened the frame beyond metal and stone. Early collages and Negative Sculpture (1958) in acrylic foregrounded a pre-industrial hand, while typed poems (including gifts to filmmaker Hollis Frampton) made the parallel argument: words, too, can be stacked, aligned, and allowed to simply sit. Across all three sites, the curatorial through-line was generous: matter is enough, if you let it speak
Andre’s art doesn’t explain; it arranges. You carry out the rest, the angle of approach, the pace, the weight. After a circuit through stone, steel, brick, wood, and type, the take-away was almost architectural: planes and modules compose an experience.
