Décès du sculpteur minimaliste et controversé Carl Andre à l’âge de 88 ans

The minimalist sculptor, who turned the search for verticality upside down and whose works offered a sensory experience to viewers, died on Wednesday, January 24th in New York at the age of 88. He was accused of the murder of his wife, the artist Ana Mendieta, and acquitted in 1988.

By flattening sculpture to create a carpet rather than a volume in the mid-60s, he stunned and delighted the public, who had never seen anything like it, or dared to walk on a work of art. With Carl Andre, what thus became permitted (or even required) was to produce sculpture without incising, carving, or molding the material, so that the artist did not leave his mark, but simply by aligning or stacking prefabricated modules with very simple geometric shapes. A groundbreaking pioneer of minimalism, the American remained true to these early precepts throughout his life and had a career without any real downturns. Even after the death, in rather murky circumstances, of his wife, the artist Ana Mendieta. Carl Andre died in New York on Wednesday, January 24th.

Born in 1935 in Quincy, Massachusetts, it was in New York, where he settled in the late 1950s, that he experimented with sculpture, as well as poetry, by working with blocks in both. On paper, these are blocks of text, typed on a typewriter that guarantees a regular space between letters and words, arranged along three axes: the grid, the list, and mathematical sequences. In space, these are blocks of wood, prefabricated units that are rigorously identical, cut with a mechanical saw, stacked together.