John McCracken

John McCracken

Two sculptures by the American artist John McCracken: 'IV' from 1985 and 'Neon' from 1989.

From the mid-1960s onwards McCracken made blocks, slabs, planks and geometric shapes utilising the basic languages of sculpture: scale, colour, height, width and breadth. McCracken's sculptures ask a fundamental question: 'how do things sit in space?' The surfaces of his objects are solid colours, seamlessly reflecting all that surround them. These are pure attitude, shifting surrounding architecture off-balance and implicating the viewer into their own forms as if, to use the artist's words, 'these pieces were visitors from another world'. 'IV' vertically leans against the wall, a marbled block of colour, while 'Neon' horizontally twists and strikes its way across the wall.

Handmade to smooth, flawless perfection, these sculptures give no visual clues to their own manufacture, sitting at odds with the industrial processes associated with McCracken's minimalist contemporaries.