About the Art:
That Silent Place
1954-55
Painted wood
20 ½ x 37 ½ x 7 1/2 inches
Gift of Devorah Sherman
Nevelson’s sought to create a space in the mind and senses where people could find harmony. That Silent Place is a flat black, wooden sculpture that captures negative and positive space leaving the viewer with a sense of mystery with light and shadows. It is reminiscent of a cityscape with the wooden blocks stacked as if the viewer is looking at a city at night. She sought the in-between places, the dawns and dusk, the objective world, the heavenly spheres, the places between the land and the sea. Black is her color of choice because it contains all colors and is not a negation of color.
About the Artist:
Louise Nevelson (American, b. 1899) was born in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire and emigrated with her family to the United States in the early 1900’s. Nevelson was an American sculptor most notably for her monochromatic, monumental wooden sculptures. She experimented early on with conceptual art using found objects, usually wood. She began studying art after she and her husband moved to New York in the 1920’s. There, she eventually began her long career in sculpting. By the end of the 1950s, her investigations into space grew into room-sized environments. Dawn’s Wedding Feast filled an entire gallery with wall constructions as well as freestanding and hanging columns and other elements reminiscent of architectural forms. Nevelson remains one of the most important figures in 20th-century American sculpture.