Ibram Lassaw

Ibram Lassaw (1913-2003) was born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1913. His family traveled and lived throughout Europe, including North Africa, Tunis, Malta, Naples, Marseille, and Istanbul, before settling in Brooklyn, all before he was nine years old. This early experience of displacement and travel shaped the international sensibility that would run through his mature sculptural practice. His education in the arts included clay-modeling classes at the Brooklyn Children's Museum, modeling from life at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, and a year of art courses at the City College of New York. During the 1930s he was involved with the Public Works of Art Program and taught sculpture under the Federal Arts Project while maintaining a personal practice in his own studio. Abandoning figuration for good in 1933, Lassaw began brazing with rods of various alloys to produce his first drip metal sculptures, some of the earliest fully abstract sculptures made by an American artist.

Trained as a welder during the Second World War, Lassaw was a pioneer in abstract sculpture and particularly in the realm of Abstract Expressionism, working alongside such artistic icons as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Franz Kline, Marcel Duchamp, and Max Ernst. He was one of the founders and served as president of the American Abstract Artists group in 1936, and he was a Charter Member of the Artists' Club in 1949, the legendary Eighth Street gathering place that became the intellectual heart of the New York School. Lassaw's influences were numerous and varied, and included Alexander Calder, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Henri Matisse, Russian Constructivism, László Moholy-Nagy, Buckminster Fuller, and Taoist and Zen teachings.

Lassaw's mature sculpture is best known for its open, lattice-like welded metal structures produced in bronze, brass, and nickel silver. These works transform the sculptural object into a genuinely spatial event, with light and air flowing through the gaps between the elements as freely as the metal itself defines the piece. His deep engagement with Eastern philosophy shaped his understanding of sculpture as a form of contemplative practice, and his works possess an unusual capacity to reward extended looking. Lassaw's sculptures are held in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, and other major American collections. He continued to work from his home in Springs, East Hampton, near his fellow Abstract Expressionists Pollock and Krasner, until his death in 2003.