Louise Nevelson is best known for her monochromatic sculptures and environments made from found materials that she began in the 1950s. These constructions of boxes and walls are created from urban detritus–dismantled furniture, milk crates, balustrades, ornaments, and scraps of wood–which she composed, layered, and painted in a single color, emphasizing the effects of light and shadow. She described this process as “shedding skin,” and called her constructions “worldscapes” to suggest the melding of the personal and the universal. Nevelson’s constructions owe something to Alberto Giacometti’s landscape sculptures and Joseph Cornell’s intimate narrative box constructions. She painted her earliest constructions a matte black; the color suggested spirituality, power, magic, and solitude, but for her, black conveyed an “essence” of experience. Later, Nevelson also employed white or gold to cover her found and constructed elements. Untitled is composed of two attached boxes—one primarily composed of vertical elements, the other predominantly horizontal—that together read like a diptych. The simple forms have been carefully nestled into the boxes and covered with her signature matte black.
