This approach to pure form is also seen in Andre’s writing practice as an artist. Letters and words join together as fragments to reveal an essence, a truth, within language and form. The artist’s concrete poetry plays with arrangement and space in a similar manner as his sculptural work does. Andre refuses to restrict himself to just one artform and finds different means to structure his subjectivity into a rationalized form. Here, the act of cognition – the work as a site of conscious and unconscious processes – produces an intimacy within the ‘objective’ of Andre’s works.

Carl Andre (1944-2024) was born in Quincy, Massachusetts and studied at the Phillips Academy in Andover. He lived and worked in New York City for most of his career. Andre won the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1984 and was honored with the Roswitha Haftmann Foundation Prize in 2011. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, for example at Dia:Beacon in New York, Kusthalle Basel, Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Musée de Marseille, Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, Bonnefantemuseum in Maastricht, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Kunsthalle Bern, The St. Louis Art Museum, and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. He also exhibited in art historically important group exhibitions such as When Attitudes Become Form at Kunsthalle Bern in 1969. Andre’s work is represented in numerous collections such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Tate Modern in London and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.