NEW YORK—More than 20 new small sculptures by Carl Andre will be exhibited at Paula Cooper Gallery, 521 West 21st Street, from 14 October through 18 November.

For me, small sculptures have an area of less than 500 square inches. I have been making them regularly for more than 40 years but displaying them publicly has always presented difficulties. Most of my sculptures are ordered arrays of more or less uniform elements. The elements of small sculptures are almost always quite small and their small inertial masses make them very vulnerable to disorderly scatter. In fact, my Scatter Pieces were created as a solution to maintaining the coherence of many small elements.

Social entropy is another force disturbing the coherence of my small sculptures. The normal flow of foot traffic in a busy museum or gallery is a sufficient cause of disorder in my small pieces. Pedestals, barriers, bases and the like are utterly inappropriate for the display of my work. Private installations present no great threats to my small sculptures and I was able to show a number of such works in the series of storefront galleries which Julian Pretto operated in Manhattan in the 1980s and 90s.

In 1973, Jennifer Licht of The Museum of Modern Art asked me to have a show of small sculptures there. We considered many solutions to the problem of maintaining the integrity of small, vulnerable works in a busy museum. At last it occurred to me to put the pedestals on top of the works! My idea was to install the small sculptures called Waterbodies on the bottom of the reflecting pools in the MoMA Sculpture Garden. It was remarked at the time that the Museum would have no trouble insuring a gigantic work that might topple over and injure someone but had no chance of insuring a work so vulnerable that it might simply disappear in the course of a normal day’s operation.

—Carl Andre, Statement about Small Sculptures, 2000

For more information, please contact the gallery: (212) 255-1105 or info@paulacoopergallery.com