Louise Nevelson: Total Life

Louise Nevelson: Total Life presents a selection of art created by Nevelson throughout her career, exhibiting key examples of her sculptural reliefs and collages from the 1950s through the 1980s, along with works on paper and jewellery that reveal the origins and depth of her artistic vision.

Nevelson is celebrated for the innovative assemblages that she composed with pieces of wood from furniture and architectural remnants that she found on the streets around her New York studio. Maintaining something of her chosen material’s prior history—as carpentered boards, cut disks, turned spindles, and hewn wood beams—Nevelson transformed disparate, cumulative elements into unified compositions that extend planar structures into three-dimensional space. Nevelson further defined her sculpture by painting them a single monochromatic tone, highlighting her manipulation of form through emphasis on the dynamic play of surface, light, and shadow. In painting her works black, white, or gold, she claimed that she was “going back to the elements: shadows, light, the sun, the moon.” Visually and physically compelling, each work operates as a cabinet of curiosities that evokes poetic associations with the cosmos and primordial mysteries.