ABOUT THE WORK

Harry Bertoia’s screens are the artist’s most compelling works due to their ethereal beauty and extreme rarity. Of the very few the artist produced, this is one of the largest and most complex in the series, the majority of which are in museum collections.

Crafted with hundreds of meticulously arranged brass-coated steel wires, the screen, which balances simplicity with complexity and geometry with organicism, serves as a remarkable and significant illustration of Bertoia's exploratory technique in sculpture and is a superlative example of the artist’s work from the early 1960s.

Sitting atop four delicate feet and consisting of intersecting brass-coated metal wires to create remarkable depth, the screen assumes new and unexpected visual vocabularies when viewed from different angles: it is simultaneously an abstracted view of a forest, a wall of hay needles, and perhaps even a representation of the cosmos in its infinite intricacy.

It is, however, not only this formal paradox—its simplicity yet complexity—that sets this work apart. The work also possesses an important provenance that adds to its compelling history.

In 1957, Bertoia won an award from the Chicago-based Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, which allowed him to travel throughout his native Italy and meet with internationally recognized artists and designers. This was an honor for Bertoia as well as an inflection point within his career. A few years later, upon its completion, the Foundation acquired this work from the artist.

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