The first exhibition of Louise Nevelson's work in the United Kingdom in nearly four decades, "Dawns and Dusks" sparsely covers the influential Ukrainian-born artist's sculpture from the 1950s to 1980s--a period that encompasses her signature black monochrome wall reliefs, surrealistic free-standing pieces, and mixed-media collages. Working in New York contemporaneously alongside the Abstract Expressionists, Nevelson produced a body of art that is difficult to pigeonhole yet to this day exerts a profound, almost mystical presence. Downstairs in the Louise Blouin Foundation's white-cube environment, the artist's already large-scale sculptures become monumental.

Nevelson often built her works from wooden detritus--banister fragments, dowels, rejected mouldings--that she found on the street and then painted them a rich matte black that she considered to be the color of peace, totality, and greatness. In works like Mirror Shadow VII (1985), the paint becomes a unifying, beautifying material that neutralizes details and obscures the commonplace previous function of the elements.

Nevelson's iconic framework, seen in exceptional examples here, is a cabinet-like series of boxes that she forms into arcane, dynamic systems. In Cascade VII (1979), she arranged lidded compartments to be left ajar at varying angles, creating a cascading movement across the façade. In End of Day Nightscape (1973), open containers built up one atop the other reveal ordered lines of inanimate objects, giving viewers the impression they're peering down into a collector’s specimen box (see above).

Upstairs, a stark untitled collage from 1985 (see below) is composed of raw wood, a bedstead, a chair back, a broom handle, and metal sheeting. Bare of black paint, the objects--arranged in a way that brings to mind the Synthetic Cubism collages of George Braque and Pablo Picasso--communicate their history through their visible marks and wear-and-tear. Where Nevelson's black paint is seen again, its transformative power over objects is apparent: it brings out the beauty of the form of the objects that is not as easily seen when their history and previous function obfuscate it.

Further Reading:
Click here to see a photo gallery from the show's opening [via Artinfo]