Carl Andre

Carl Andre , 1935-, American sculptor, b. Quincy, Mass. A former student of Patrick Morgan and Frank Stella, Andre produces sculptures of elemental, classic form. His works reflect the quarries, shipyards, and islands of his birthplace and his years spent as a freight-train brakeman. One of the founders of the minimalist sculpture movement, he is famous for his floor pieces, including Lever (1966), in which fire bricks were arranged to extend laterally 400 feet (122 m) from a gallery wall. In 1988, he was tried and acquitted of pushing his wife, land art sculptor Ana Mendiata, to her death from the window of their 34th-floor apartment.

Andre, Carl (1935– ). American sculptor, a leading exponent of Minimal art. Typically he produces his works by placing identical ready-made commercial units such as bricks, cement blocks, metal plates, etc. (occasionally ‘natural products’ like logs or bales of hay) in simple geometrical arrangements without adhesives or joints; the works are dismantled when not on exhibition. His most characteristic products abjure height and are arranged as horizontal configurations on the ground (‘more like roads than buildings’, in his own words); some are even intended to be walked over. In Britain Andre is best known for the sensational publicity accompanying the ‘Tate bricks’ incident in 1976. His Equivalent VIII (1966) (consisting of 120 bricks arranged two deep in a rectangle) was vandalized and there was an outcry about the alleged waste of public money on its purchase by the Tate Gallery. In 1985 Andre again made headlines when he was charged with murdering his wife (who died after falling from a window); he was acquitted at his trial.