MILAN.- Cardi Gallery, the Milan-based modern and contemporary art gallery, presents Louise Nevelson: 55-70, an exhibition of over thirty important collages and sculptures created between 1955 and 1970 that reveal the formalist achievements of Louise Nevelson (1899-1988), an icon of the Feminist art movement and one of the most significant American sculptors of the 20th century. Louise Nevelson: 55-70, is on view October 9 – December 20, 2014.

Louise Nevelson: 55-70 features works created between 1955 and 1970, a period when the artist’s signature modernist style emerged, with labyrinthine wooden assemblages and monochrome surfaces, and evolved, as Nevelson incorporated industrial materials such as Plexiglas, aluminum and steel in the 1960s and 1970s. The exhibition at Cardi Gallery presents more than twenty-five collages and ten sculptures from private collections around the world, including large-scale monochrome reliefs, freestanding large-scale sculptures, and mixed media collages on paper and board, incorporating newsprint, paint, vinyl, metal, and other found objects.

“I go to the sculpture, and my eye tells me what is right for me,” explained Nevelson. “When I compose, I don’t have anything but the material, myself, and an assistant. I compose right there while the assistant hammers. Sometimes it’s the material that takes over; sometimes it’s me that takes over. I permit them to play, like a seesaw. I use action and counteraction, like in music, all the time. Action and counteraction. It was always a relationship – my speaking to the wood and the wood speaking back to me."¹

Louise Nevelson (1899-1988) is one of the preeminent American sculptors of the twentieth century. Working at a time when the masculine Abstract Expressionist movement was at its height, she challenged the convention that women could not make powerful large-scale works with her outsized sculptures and assemblages.

Nevelson was born in Kiev in 1899 and immigrated to the United States with her family in 1905. In 1920, she moved to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. Studying at the Art Students League in New York under Kenneth Hayes Miller and later in Munich under Hans Hoffmann, Nevelson was introduced to Cubism, Surrealism, African, American Indian and Pre-Columbian art, movements and styles that would prove significant influence on her work. The artist’s work has shown at galleries and museums since her first solo show at the Nierendorf Gallery in New York in 1941, including her first important museum exhibition Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1959, and her first major museum exhibition in 1967 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.