‘The first sculpture I made with a piece of string and a little wire,’ Fred Sandback wrote, ‘was the outline of a rectangular solid - a 2” x 4” -lying on the floor. It was a casual act, but it seemed to open up a lot of possibilities for me. I could assert a certain place or volume in its full materiality without occupying and obscuring it.’

This brief, understated statement, marking the twentieth anniversary of the ‘casual act’ in 1966 that would come to define the center of Sandback’s practice shares something with that practice. It has a lightness of touch, belying a deep purpose, it has clarity, simplicity and, if Minimalist sculptures can be said to share personality traits with their sculptors, it also seems to contain a hint of playful self-deprecation.

Sandback’s best known constructions, mostly untitled lines, planes and shapes marked out in space by lengths of coloured yarn or wire, drawn tight, are undoubtedly minimalist, they are not quite Minimalist. They are spare, of course, and universal, and, in describing geometric shapes, they adhere to the superficial constants of Minimalist style.

But there’s something distinctly not-Minimalist in Sandback’s minimalism. These are not works to walk around, look at and consider, as you would, say, one of Sol LeWitt’s faceted pyramids, or an assembly of neon tubes by Dan Flavin. Instead, they are works to step over - existing as they do in what Sandback called ‘pedestrian space’ - and look through; they are not just objects with which the viewer can form a relationship, but objects that work to reconfigure the viewer’s relationship with the space around them. (In his essay in the publication to accompany this exhibition, Yve-Alain Bois compares viewing a Sandback construction to that odd sensation when a train adjacent to the one you are sitting on pulls away, momentarily sparking the sensation of movement.)

These pieces lack, too, the almost overweening certainty common to much Minimalist sculpture, displaying instead a sort of uncertain, transient, impermanent quality - as well as being not quite there, for all that these works transform space, they are transformed by it, never the same twice, dependent on an altered by their architectural surroundings, and, to co-opt jargon applied to very different media, time-based.

The last point raises a problem for this posthumous retrospective (the artist died in 2003), since, by connecting ceiling to floor, or seeming to balance a trapezoid at the junction of two walls, Sandback was an installation artist of a kind, bound to allow a new gallery to affect an old work, however precise the written instructions he filed for each sculpture were, or however much he dismissed his characterisation as an installer. As well as being the first chance to see Sandback’s work in Scotland, then, this is a chance to see his sculptures installed without Sandback’s guiding hand, though whether this will result in a loss, or add a purity of sorts is impossible to say.

The show is, too, a wide-ranging and full retrospective, moving beyond the canonical Sandback to include early sculptures in metal, works on paper and paintings. One of these, from 2003, seems key: in following a Mondrian painting - Composition With Red, Yellow, Blue 1930 - Sandback copies the lines and scale of the original. But renders it in flatly monochromatic black.

This review was first published in The Herald in March 2007.