Carl Andre

Carl Andre is an American Conceptual artist known for his Minimalist sculptures and installations. His experience working blue collar jobs and the aesthetics of industrial design have had a deep impact on his art, and along with Sol Lewitt and Donald Judd. Andre was born in 1935 in Quincy, Massachusetts. From 1951 to 1953, he attended the Phillips Academy, Andover, where he studied art under Patrick Morgan. In 1957 he settled in New York and worked as an editorial assistant for a publishing house. Shortly thereafter, he began executing wood sculptures influenced by Constantin Brancusi and by the black paintings of his friend Frank Stella.

A number of experiences—including four years of work in rail yards in the early 1960s and a trip to the prehistoric archaeological site of Stonehenge in England—solidified Andre’s determination to work with modular units using ordinary, factory finished raw materials such as wood, copper and lead. His best-known works included "Stone Field Sculpture" from 1977 and "144 Lead Square" from 1969. The artist made floor sculptures out of standard industrial units such as bricks or metal plates in simple arithmetic combinations. Andre’s use of the grid reduced his work to the quality of his materials and their role in his realization of an idea, often dependent upon and specific to the environment in which they were originally installed. He believed in sculpture as place, “an area within which an environment has been altered in such a way as to make the general environment more conspicuous.” 

His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Tate Gallery in London, among others. Andre lives and works in New York, NY.