Carl Andre - Dreamy Life - original signed drawing, 1979

Carl Andre - Dreamy Life - original signed drawing, 1979

This original signed pelt tip pen on card drawing of two figures was created in 1979 and is on a postmarked (mailed) card.
Titled "Dreamy Life" and signed on the address side.
The card is addressed to A.M., who Carl Andre has addressed in separate correspondence variously as "Ammama" and "Ammaman". Over the course of a number of years, Carl Andre engaged in correspondence with this individual, evidently a fellow artist as Andre references their "glove and tree" works - but otherwise unidentified. The present letter is special as it has a drawing rather than just text. The drawing is postmarked from New York and sent to AM in Springfield Oregon, but at other times the recipient's main address is on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Eerily and coincidentally, A.M. bears the same initials as Carl Andre's ex-wife Ana Mendieta, whom he was accused of, and later acquitted of murdering - but his correspondence with AM pre-dates, and post-dates Andre's relationship with Mendieta.
This two sided drawing is signed on the addressee side and framed using transparent pocket corners in a museum quality frame with double sided plexiglass
Measurements:
Framed:
10.25 inches (vertical) by 12.5 inches (horizontal) by 1.5 inches
Artwork:
3.5 inches (vertical) x 6 inches (horizontal)
CARL ANDRE BIOGRAPHY
Born in 1935 in Quincy, Massachusetts, Carl Andre is most closely associated with minimalism, cultivating over the course of his career a sculptural interest in site-specific, modular works that emphasize the placement and mass of such everyday materials as bricks and wooden beams. His innovative explorations also developed new possibilities for the spectator’s role in sculpture, especially in works consisting of a grid of flat metal squares placed directly on the floor, inviting viewers to walk upon it.

Early travels in Europe and work in Army Intelligence brought Andre into contact with neolithic art, Stonehenge and elements of Japanese aesthetics, all of which exerted a formative influence upon him. His early artistic influences included Frank Stella’s Black Paintings, the work of his childhood friend, the experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton, and the sculpture of Constantin Brancusi. Of the last of these, Andre reflected, “All I’m doing is putting Brancusi’s Endless Column on the ground instead of the sky.”2 In addition to sculpture, Andre throughout his career produced critical texts, concrete poetry, and conceptual magazines. His radical departures from accepted art practices and insistence upon a non-hierarchical use of material and space have contributed to his continued centrality in Minimalist and late Modernist sculpture.

After working as a freight brakeman and conductor on the Pennsylvania Railroad in New Jersey from 1960 to 1964, Andre had his first solo exhibition at New York’s Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1965 and participated in a number of that decade’s most important group shows, including Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors, Jewish Museum, New York (1966), Documenta 4, Kassel, Germany (1968), and Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, Kunsthalle Bern (1969), culminating in his first retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1970, when he was thirty-five years old. In 2014, the Dia Art Foundation presented the retrospective exhibition Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958-2010, which traveled to cities in the US and Europe.

In 2010, he stopped making art. On January 24, 2024, Andre died in Manhattan at the age of 88.