‘The first sculpture I made with a piece of string and a little wire,’ Fred Sandback wrote, ‘was the outline of a rect­an­gu­lar solid - a 2” x 4” -lying on the floor. It was a casual act, but it seemed to open up a lot of pos­s­ib­il­it­ies for me. I could assert a certain place or volume in its full ma­ter­i­al­ity without occupying and obscuring it.’

This brief, un­der­stated statement, marking the twentieth an­n­iver­sary of the ‘casual act’ in 1966 that would come to define the center of Sandback’s practice shares something with that practice. It has a lightness of touch, belying a deep purpose, it has clarity, sim­pli­city and, if Min­im­al­ist sculp­tures can be said to share per­son­al­ity traits with their sculptors, it also seems to contain a hint of playful self-de­prec­a­tion.

Sandback’s best known con­struc­tions, mostly untitled lines, planes and shapes marked out in space by lengths of coloured yarn or wire, drawn tight, are un­doub­tedly min­im­al­ist, they are not quite Min­im­al­ist. They are spare, of course, and universal, and, in de­scrib­ing geometric shapes, they adhere to the su­per­fi­ci­al constants of Min­im­al­ist style.

But there’s something dis­t­inc­tly not-Min­im­al­ist in Sandback’s min­im­al­ism. These are not works to walk around, look at and consider, as you would, say, one of Sol LeWitt’s faceted pyramids, or an assembly of neon tubes by Dan Flavin. Instead, they are works to step over - existing as they do in what Sandback called ‘ped­es­tri­an space’ - and look through; they are not just objects with which the viewer can form a re­la­tion­ship, but objects that work to re­con­fig­ure the viewer’s re­la­tion­ship with the space around them. (In his essay in the pub­lic­a­tion to accompany this ex­hib­i­tion, Yve-Alain Bois compares viewing a Sandback con­struc­tion to that odd sensation when a train adjacent to the one you are sitting on pulls away, mo­ment­ar­ily sparking the sensation of movement.)

These pieces lack, too, the almost over­ween­ing certainty common to much Min­im­al­ist sculpture, dis­play­ing instead a sort of uncertain, transient, im­per­man­ent quality - as well as being not quite there, for all that these works transform space, they are tran­s­formed by it, never the same twice, dependent on an altered by their ar­chi­tec­tur­al sur­roun­d­ings, and, to co-opt jargon applied to very different media, time-based.

The last point raises a problem for this pos­thu­m­ous ret­ro­spect­ive (the artist died in 2003), since, by con­nect­ing ceiling to floor, or seeming to balance a trapezoid at the junction of two walls, Sandback was an in­stal­l­a­tion artist of a kind, bound to allow a new gallery to affect an old work, however precise the written in­struc­tions he filed for each sculpture were, or however much he dismissed his char­ac­ter­isa­tion as an installer. As well as being the first chance to see Sandback’s work in Scotland, then, this is a chance to see his sculp­tures installed without Sandback’s guiding hand, though whether this will result in a loss, or add a purity of sorts is im­pos­s­ible to say.

The show is, too, a wide-ranging and full ret­ro­spect­ive, moving beyond the canonical Sandback to include early sculp­tures in metal, works on paper and paintings. One of these, from 2003, seems key: in following a Mondrian painting - Com­pos­i­tion With Red, Yellow, Blue 1930 - Sandback copies the lines and scale of the original. But renders it in flatly mono­chro­mat­ic black.

This review was first published in The Herald in March 2007.