Louise Nevelson was born in Pereiaslav, near Kiev, Ukraine, in 1899. She emigrated to the United States with her family in 1905, settling in Maine. In the 1930s she travelled to Europe, studying with Hans Hofmann in Munich before joining the Art Students League in New York. Nevelson then had her first one-person exhibition with Nierendorf Gallery, New York, in 1941. In the early 1950s she travelled to Guatemala and Mexico to explore the legacy of pre-Columbian cultures, an experience that would come to influence her practice profoundly. In 1967, following a one-person exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art and several outdoor public commissions, Nevelson achieved recognition as one of the leading voices in North American
sculpture. Yet her unexpected combinations of found objects, paper and materials from the domestic environment linked her work more closely to a lineage of artists who explored the links between
collage, assemblage and sculpture-making, from predecessors Kurt Schwitters and
Jean Arp to contemporaries
Robert Rauschenberg and John Chamberlain.
