Making Space: Katarzyna Kobro

KATARZYNA KOBRO’S SPATIAL COMPOSITION 5 (1929) is a lesson in economy. Constructed from welded planes of white-painted steel, the tabletop sculpture is just over 25 inches on its longest side. Despite this material modesty, it is a work of staggering complexity, an effect of what is physically absent as much as what is present. Horizontal in orientation, the sculpture is supported by a long rectangular plane that can be described as a base only in the loosest sense of the term: the adjoini