Fred Sandback and Richard Serra

“There isn’t an idea which transcends the actuality of the pieces. The actuality is the idea.”

– Fred Sandback

In 1993, Barbara Krakow asked Fred Sandback to choose an artist to be paired with him in a two-person show. Sandback requested Richard Serra.

Over thirty years later, both artists have passed away, but the dialogue between their work is as active as it was then. Solidity and openness, weight and lightness, as well as permanence and temporality are just a few of the complementary dynamics set up by Sandback’s curatorial request.

The current exhibition at Krakow Witkin Gallery, rather than re-exhibiting the works from 1993, further explores the juxtaposition of these two artists with earlier works of Sandback’s and later works of Serra’s.  Sandback’s two works in elastic cord on view date from the early 1970s, before the artist transitioned to using acrylic yarn. Both “leaning” forms, their “volume” and “weight” exist as much in one’s eye and mind as they do in physical presence.

Similarly, Serra’s “Weight and Measure” works from the mid-1990s place mass and void in counterpoint, creating formal and psychological perceptions of tension. As with the artist’s monumental sculptural works in patinated COR-TEN steel, whose walls and openings distort the viewer’s sense of space, Serra’s works on paper generate perceptible gravitational pulls between densely textured inked surfaces and weightless swaths of unprinted paper.

Employing modulations of material and space, each in their own distinctive vocabularies, Fred Sandback (1943–2003) and Richard Serra (1938–2024) were leading investigators of the “embodied experience of perception.” Discussion of historical and theoretical throughlines of the works on view can’t convey them, however, any more than can images. The viewer and their physical relationship to the works is an essential element to the situations that both Sandback and Serra create.

The exhibition is on view May 30 – July 17, 2026.

”[My works on paper] deal with weight and edge in relation to context in relation to movement in relation to redefining how you understand a space.”

– Richard Serra