Fred Sandback's sculptures are made of the positive space of the yarn and the negative voids of the room. Sandback once described his artistic practice as "a nomadicized existence" because he had to travel to different sites to bring his sculptures into being. As he traveled, he carried a duffle bag containing skeins of acrylic yarn. Sandback stretched the yarn point-to-point within a room to create geometric figures that simultaneously define pictorial planes and architectural volumes. The yarn is fixed in space, but the illusionistic effect shifts as the viewer moves around, in between, and underneath it.

 

Untitled is a site-specific conceptual installation comprised of tile-red acrylic yarn. The work is from Fred Sandback's "diagonal construction" series. The artist created it for his 1989 exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery. This installation at the IMA represents the first occasion of Untitled's exhibition since that time. The work was originally presented against a window, much as it appears here.