Photo 1/1 du lot
Premium BONHAMS CORNETTE DE SAINT CYR

11 - 11. CARL ANDRE (1935-2024) 25 TX Steel Square (25 elements) …
See original version (French)

Estimate €80,000 - €120,000
Sale commission
Description
11. CARL ANDRE (1935-2024) 25 TX Steel Square (25 elements) 1975 hot-rolled steel Each: 1.6 x 14 x 14 cm. Each: 5/8 x 5 1/2 x 5 1/2 in. Overall dimensions: 1.6 x 71.1 x 71.1 cm. Overall dimensions: 5/8 x 28 x 28 in. Made in 1975, this work is unique. A certificate from the artist will be given to the buyer. Provenance Barbara Cusack Gallery, Houston Paula Cooper (at Yvon Lambert), Paris Collection Monsieur & Madame Claude Cluzel, Europe (acquired from her in 1980) Then by descent to the current owner Exhibitions Houston, Barbara Cusack Gallery, Carl Andre, April 1975 Paris, Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paula Cooper at Yvon Lambert, 16 February - 15 March 1980 Bibliography Piet de Jonge, Rita Sartorius, Carl Andre: exhibition in 2 parts, Den Haag, Haags Gemeentemuseum (9 January - 3 March 1987) ; Eindhoven, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum (11 January - 3 March 1987), 1987, p. 88, n°15, listed Eva Meyer-Hermann, Carl Andre: Sculptor 1996, Stuttgart 1996, p. 144, listed Exhibited the year of its creation at the Barbara Cusack Gallery in Houston, then presented in Paris in 1980 by Paula Cooper and Yvon Lambert, 25 TX Steel Square (1975) imposes itself on the viewer and condenses the foundations of Carl Andre's minimal thinking. After discovering megalithic sites in England during a trip he took after completing his studies at Phillips Academy in Andover (1951-1953), Carl Andre gradually moved away from painting to become fully involved in sculpture. In New York, the artist shared a studio with Frank Stella, another major figure in Minimal Art, with whom he maintained a powerful and fertile dialogue on the notions of geometry, texture and repetition of motif. Initially involved in working with wood, in a tradition still marked by verticality - hewing and pruning the material - the artist made a decisive turning point in the 1960s. With his Elements series, Andre abandoned the direct transformation of the material, preferring to use pre-existing units of identical dimensions, which he arranged in space, rather than modelling. As he put it in an interview in 1966: "Up to a certain point, I made cuts inside things. Then I realised that the thing cut out was in fact the cut-out. Now I no longer cut the material: I use the material as a cut-out of space." (In Artforum V-2, October 1966, p. 15). That same year, Carl Andre took part in one of the founding exhibitions of Minimal Art, Primary Structures, Younger American and British Sculptors, at the Jewish Museum in New York, alongside Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Anne Truitt and Robert Morris. In his practice, Andre eliminated the plinth and, from the 1960s onwards, adopted the use of metal slabs whose flatness corresponds directly to that of the floor on which they are placed. For the artist, the work is not a simple object: placed flush with the ground, the work occupies the space, revealing and redefining it, itself becoming a place of experience. In this radically new approach to sculpture, Carl Andre questions the existing relationships of scale between the work, the site and the viewer, inviting the observer to engage with several degrees of appreciation: visual, sensory and intellectual. By focusing attention on a horizontal plane, the artist encourages the viewer to move around, cross and experience the sculpture. Its positioning, its presence and its components are all vectors of perception that allow the viewer to feel the piece. Although the sculptor does not intervene in the materials he chooses to build his works, his concept fully integrates the elements likely to impact on them, such as their specific characteristics, time and interaction with man. Their evolution, and in particular their perceptible ageing, plays a part in the experimentation of those who activate the work. Composed of twenty-five sheets of raw steel, 25 TX Steel Square synthesises Carl Andre's investigations into the module and its combinatory capacities, offering a new conception of the sculptural object. Part of the emblematic Square series and produced during a decisive decade in the artist's career, shortly after his first major retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1970, this work has remained in the collection of Mr & Mrs Cluzel for over forty years. Widely represented in the prestigious collections of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Tate Modern in London and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Carl Andre is a key figure in Minimal and Conceptual Art, overturning the principles that governed sculpture at the time. The work is no longer simply something to be seen, but something to be experienced, involving the viewer's body and profoundly redefining the ways in which we perceive and interact with art.
See original version (French)
Auto-translation. Refer to original language for legal validity.
About the sale Post-War & Contemporary Art including the Cluzel Collection
Auction location
Auction time 06/04/2026 at 4:00 PM
Pictures credits: Contact the Auction House
You may also like