Nevelson is celebrated for the innovative assemblages that she composed with pieces of wood from furniture and architectural remnants that she found on the streets around her New York studio. Maintaining something of her chosen material’s prior history—as carpentered boards, cut disks, turned spindles, and hewn wood beams—Nevelson transformed disparate, cumulative elements into unified compositions that extend planar structures into three-dimensional space. Nevelson further defined her sculpture by painting them a single monochromatic tone, highlighting her manipulation of form through emphasis on the dynamic play of surface, light, and shadow. In painting her works black, white, or gold, she claimed that she was “going back to the elements: shadows, light, the sun, the moon.” Visually and physically compelling, each work operates like a cabinet of curiosities that evokes poetic associations with the cosmos and primordial mysteries.
