Louise Nevelson (Russian/American, 1899-1988) "Untitled", 1956 wood and paper assemblage signed and dated lower right. Glazed and framed in a shadowbox with "Pace Gallery" label on reverse. 36" x 24", framed 37-1/4", 25-3/4" Provenance: Pace Gallery, New York, New York; Estate of Elaine Levy Proler, Houston, Texas. Notes: When you put things together, things that other people have thrown out, you're really bringing them to life - a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created. -Louise Nevelson Nevelson built extraordinary collages and assemblages from found objects and deconstructed material that has its roots in her early childhood as a young Jewish immigrant. Shortly after moving from Russia, her family settled in Maine where Nevelson's father found work as a woodcutter and lumberyard worker, often bringing home odds and ends of wood for projects or tinder. As a struggling artist in the 1930s, she often scoured the streets of New York with her young son in search of wood. Branches, twigs, spindles, drawers and turned desk legs were amassed collectively and began to take form into abstract shapes and cityscapes that merged the mathematical and geometric properties of Cubist vision/quest to represent the 4th dimension with the spiritual transcendence of Abstract Expressionism, that led her to the self-proclaimed title: architect of shadow. Nevelson's mature sculptural work of assemblages, rendered in black, dark colors or shadows, prototypical of the work offered here, explore arrested movement- the monochromatic tones focus the eye on the light created by the natural variations of the wood and objects, rather than the illusion of it. These works are the manifestation of a twenty-year sojourn of self- discovery that led her to leave behind a middle class marriage to pursue art through Hans Hoffman in Germany and New York, before entering the studio of Diego Rivera and travelling throughout Mexico and South America where she found inspiration in the Pre-Columbian stellae of the Maya. In Nevelson's words- "You see shadow and everything else on earth actually is moving. Movement - that's in color, that's in form, that's in almost everything. Shadow is fleeting... and I arrest it and I give it a solid substance." See More