Phaidon Press presents "Carl Andre: Things in Their Elements" by Alistair Rider

Phaidon Press has launched an enlightening monograph offering a comprehensive and insightful look at the career of groundbreaking American minimalist sculptor Carl Andre.

With unique access to Andre’s studio and personal archives, its author, academic and Carl Andre expert Alistair Rider, examines Andre’s role as a sculptor and installation artist.
The book "Carl Andre: Things in Their Elements" includes never before published sketches and writings, many contemporary installation photographs, and works in private collections and those in major international museums.

Rider also presents the artist's rarely seen poetry and photography that form an integral part of his oeuvre.
Andre's concrete poetry has exhibited in the United States and Europe, part of which is in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Born in Quincy, MA, on September 16, 1935, Carl Andre studied art at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA. There he became friends with Hollis Frampton who later introduced him to Constantin Brâncuşi.
From 1958 to 1960, Andre shared a studio with former classmate from Phillips Academy, Frank Stella.
Although his early work in wood may have been inspired by Brâncuşi, his conversations with Stella about space and form led him in a different direction.


Recognized both for his ordered linear format and floor-based grid-like formations of breeze blocks, Carl Andre makes his first public debut in 1965, in ‘Shape and Structure’ curated by Henry Geldzahler at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.
The following year, New York’s Jewish Museum included his controversial LEVER in its important exhibition ‘Primary Structures’.



In 1969 Andre helped organize the Art Workers Coalition.
His first solo show takes place at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1970.
Carl Andre lives and works in New York, and his work features in leading collections worldwide.

Alistair Rider is a Lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews. He teaches classes on modern sculpture, critical theory, New York modernism and experimental art of the 1960s.