Born in Kiev, Ucraine, and lived in the United States her whole life starting in 1905, Louise Nevelson (1899-1989) was a sculptor with a unique artistic language: a conscious work of assemblages of different materials, especially wood, from the use and disuse of furnishings and objects. Recovered everywhere, from everyday context, these materials prove to be special since they are already formed, namely, they have a story, a memory, a past. For Nevelson, taking this into account means emphasising the human action that came before, and continuing it.
She studied in New York with K.H. Miller at the Art Students League, and in Monaco with H. Hoffmann. Thanks to her sculptural production, influenced by the great avant-gardes of the 20th Century, and especially the cubism and the American neodada movement, she can be enumerated among the most significant exponents of post-World War II art.
The period of his artistic maturity, the one best known to the general public, begins with an intermediate phase - nonetheless conscious and far from confused - in which the Ukrainian-American artist experiments with sculptural spatiality in the compactness, in the synthesis of the subject represented. The uniform blackness avoids dispersion; the density and the formal sobriety keep the composition of the parts included. A striking examples is The big cat (terracotta painted black, c. 1955): the geometric purity of forms; its fully dominant volumetries even in small to medium dimensions; its large, undisturbed surfaces; the visage emerging from the graffiti; the synthesis of the subject and the stylistic coherence, perceived form the use of terracotta alone - they congregate in an authentic combination that transforms the black mass into an animated character that has a fabled, rather than descriptive, mark. In that sense, as Eleanor Munro points out, «her compositions linger on the borderline between surrealism and abstraction».