Louise Nevelson

American female sculptor, Louise Nevelson was born September 23, 1899 near Kyiv, Ukraine. In 1905 her family moved to the United States and settled in Rockland, Maine. She moved to New York City in 1920 where she gradually pursued formal training, eventually enrolling at the Art Students League in 1929. During this time, she studied under artists such as Hans Hoffman and worked as an assistant to Diego Rivera.

In the 1940’s she started producing her iconic found object assemblages.  For these works she favored wood, but she used other materials as well. In the 1950’s she began painting these works all one color, most notably black, which would become her signature and helped her gain commercial success. By the end of the 1950’s she started making very large room-sized environments which was a great achievement for a woman artist of her time.

Nevelson’s interest in shadow and space is evident in these monochromatic compositions which meld personal and external landscapes. While Nevelson’s oeuvre is situated in lineage with Cubism and Constructivism, the aesthetics work and her interest in the transcendence of object and space are evidence of an affinity with Abstract Expressionism.

Nevelson represented the United States at the Venice Biennial in 1962 and had a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the 1967. Today, her works are held in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others.

Available Works