Barbara Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of sculptures by Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Robert Gober, Donald Judd, Sol Lewitt, Richard Long, Mario Merz, Richard Serra and Robert Smithson.

The exhibition begins in the early sixties with several works by Minimalist artists who saw in sculpture the possibility of cleansing art of all pretensions to illusionist representation, leaving only the self-evident and essential reality of the object.  This exhibition includes a 198 square inch grid of flat aluminum squares by Carl Andre, in which he literally leveled sculpture to all but its most basic qualities of material and structure.  A similar preoccupation with the basic physical properties of an industrial material can be seen in one of Richard Serra's earliest sculptures of a lead Bent Pipe Roll from 1968 Also included is Donald Judd's bullnose progression in galvanized iron from 1967.

In Sol Lewitt's open cube based on a modular grid, the Minimalist aesthetic is adapted to express the artist's belief in the ultimate importance in art of the idea.  The simplicity of form and material allows for nothing to detract the viewer's attention from the stark beauty of the generating idea.  With his fluorescent light sculptures, Dan Flavin fused elementary forms with industrial materials.  The work in this exhibition from 1967 belongs to his series of "monuments" to the Russian Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin.  Here, the luminescent, towering construction of seven light tubes is a befitting homage to Tatlin's dedication to harmonizing art and science.

Also included in this exhibition is a rarely exhibited work by Robert Smithson from 1973.  This small but lively construction of twigs and corrugated cardboard suggests the dialectic between nature and culture as well as structural presence and natural disintegration.  Mario Merz's Fibonacci Igloo from 1972, constructed of a metal frame, fabric blocks and neon lights, resonates with social commentary and metaphor.  The final piece of this exhibition is one of Robert Gober's sinks, in which he has constructed the basic form of the object from plaster, wood, metal and paint and distorted it by stripping it bare of all its distinguishable functional features and inverting its form.  In this way, the sink takes on new meaning as an object of expressive intrigue with strikingly Minimalist aesthetics.