ARTifacts

There will be no opening-night reception at Lawrence Markey for Fred Sandback’s “Untitled (Four-part Vertical Construction in Two Colors, 1987).” Sandback’s installation, which like much of his work is spare and made of lengths of colored yarn, is reportedly too potentially fragile for opening-shindig merrymakers a little buzzed on wine. But that’s all the better; Sandback’s work rewards quiet contemplation, particularly, we imagine, in Markey’s light-generous, oddly welcoming space. It’s not the kind of stuff you crow about to 10 people waiting in the beer line, but a set of filaments connecting your thinking to that of the artist. Lynne Cooke, curator at large for the Dia Art Foundation in New York, and chief curator at the Centro Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain, once said of the Judd-era minimalist … “Sandback’s art has distinguished and differentiated itself from that of his immediate forebears by its eschewal of the reductively literal and of the material as its primary modes of being. In his exploration of physical relationships via the incorporeal rather than through concrete matter—via the interplay of vacancy and volume — he recognizes that the illusory and the factual are inextricably intertwined.” Where Judd, then, gives us a box, Sandback gives us a ghost. Noon-5 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, January 26-March 5, 311 6th Street, (210) 228 9966, lawrencemarkey.com. — Sarah Fisch