Giving Shape to Space: Frecon, Sandback, Taylor

David Zwirner is pleased to announce an exhibition featuring Suzan Frecon (b. 1941), Fred Sandback (1943–2003), and Al Taylor (1948–1999) at the gallery’s 525 West 19th Street location in New York. These artists—who have been central to the gallery’s program over the course of the past two decades—intersected in New York, living and working in the city, and encountering each other’s work.

Eschewing the various artistic styles that came in and out of fashion—in particular minimal, postminimal, and conceptual practices—in favor of distinctive individual modes of expression, each artist over time developed their own method for giving shape to space. Seen together, these three singular takes on abstraction find commonality in an innovative treatment of material, color, form, and line. Each facilitates a dynamic interchange between positive and negative space, privileging the experience of the viewer as a crucial component of their respective practices. The exhibition will include oil paintings by Frecon, sculptures made by stretching lengths of yarn in varied configurations by Sandback, and three-dimensional constructions as well as paintings by Taylor.

While each artist was independently engaged in their own visual exploration, they showed at some of the same galleries—including Galerie Fred Jahn, Munich and Lawrence Markey Gallery, New York—and ran into each other at popular spots, overlapping at a particular moment in downtown New York’s storied avant-garde history.

Fred Sandback, Untitled (Sculptural Study, Eighteen-part Architectonic Vertical Construction), 1987/2018
© 2025 Fred Sandback Archive, Courtesy Fred Sandback Archive and David Zwirner
Fred Sandback, Untitled (Sculptural Study, Eighteen-part Architectonic Vertical Construction), 1987/2018 © 2025 Fred Sandback Archive, Courtesy Fred Sandback Archive and David Zwirner

© Text and Photo Courtesy of David Zwirner

DETAILS
Giving Shape to Space: Frecon, Sandback, Taylor
21 March → 19 April 2025

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