One day, in my bedroom, I was looking at a napkin left on a chair and I suddenly realized that not only was each object alone, but that it had a weight — or actually a weightlessness — that kept it from weighing on any other. The napkin was alone, so alone that I felt I could take away the chair without changing the napkin’s position. It had its own place, its own weight, even its own silence. The world was light, light… — Alberto Giacometti
In his essay on artist and friend Alberto Giacometti, French writer Jean Genet describes a conversation in which Giacometti discusses his understanding of objects as existing in a kind of spatial solitude, apart from their surroundings, with the ability to generate a new awareness of space around them. In this brief exchange, the artist offers his impression of the complex and poetic relationship we share with the material, physical world. It is through the act of making a sculpture that Giacometti — and the artist in general — imbues each object with its own place or weight, or as Genet describes, “the sensation of space” that surrounds it.
Taking Genet’s description as its title, this exhibition looks at the ever-expanding ways artists create sculptures that generate, activate, and occupy space in all its physical and psychological manifestations. At its foundation is a dialogue between the Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, one of the world’s finest collections of European and American modern and contemporary sculpture, and The Rachofsky Collection, a post-WWII collection of art from around the world with focuses in identity, process, and conceptual work. The Sensation of Space explores the material, formal, and thematic connections in works dating from the mid-19th century to the present and illustrates how artists continually seek out new ways to redefine traditional notions of sculpture.
The Sensation of Space is co-organized by The Warehouse in partnership with the Nasher Sculpture Center. The exhibition features works from The Rachofsky Collection, the Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Collection of Marguerite Steed Hoffman, the Collection of Deedie Potter Rose, and the Collection of Christen and Derek Wilson.
Dr. Leigh A. Arnold & Thomas Feulmer
Exhibition Curators