September 1, 2025
I have followed the work of Alan Saret (b. New York City, 1944) since the late 1960s, first encountering it at Bykert Gallery (1966–74), a venue that played a critical role in shaping the era. Saret’s work remains challenging even now; on those rare occasions when I see his wire sculptures, I am fascinated by Saret’s ability to subtly combine the phenomenological with the cognitive and to infuse the conceptual with the poetic. The title of this exhibition, Galacticonexus—a neologism that fuses “galactic” and “nexus”—is itself highly revealing, as it draws upon the language of speculative fiction and conjures images of the architecture of cosmic interconnectivity. The analogy is apt, since the show consists of an expansive array of nineteen hanging wire sculptures dating from 1975 to 2023.
Installed throughout Karma’s expansive Chelsea gallery, Saret’s sculptures are suspended at varying heights—some hovering just above the floor, others floating overhead—to evoke the vastness of space. Their installation encourages viewers to navigate among the works. In this environment, Saret’s sculptures become not just objects, but spatial phenomena, events and situations to be experienced both bodily and perceptually. As such, while the cosmic associations are apt, they are also somewhat misleading, for Saret’s concerns extend well beyond conjuring up an imagined cosmos.
To fully understand his practice, it is necessary to situate it in the historical context from which it emerged. Saret was first associated with Post-Minimalism—a movement now somewhat marginalized in art history, yet one that, as Robert Pincus-Witten noted, revitalized gestural abstraction by introducing new principles of process, duration, and knowledge. In his book Postminimalism (1977), Pincus-Witten describes how artists in this movement moved beyond the formalist and industrial aesthetics of Minimalism by embracing unconventional materials, prioritizing process, and privileging embodied experience. This heterogeneity, he argues, enriched modernism’s conceptual and sensory possibilities. Post-Minimalism, in seeking both to expand upon the aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism and to move beyond its subjectivism, offered a phenomenological alternative to the semiotics and conceptualism that would later define postmodernism.
Although the works in the exhibition vary in size, mass, and structure, each is a hanging, floating sculpture that is at once tangible and evanescent, structured and chaotic. Their lightness and openness visually yield to the gallery’s enveloping white walls; while the works seem ephemeral, they also emerge as distant, galaxy-like focal points. Each piece functions as structure, armature, and architecture, and ultimately as a situation—oscillating between order and dissolution while manifesting both palpable space and elusive mass. Through the interplay of entwined knots and loose ends, Saret heightens the viewer’s bodily sense of “seeing” and spatial awareness. The wire itself seems to store a memory of the gestures and movements of the work’s maker, inviting perceptual, conceptual, and haptic engagement.
Saret’s work is both visually and conceptually analogous to the intricate networks of Jackson Pollock’s drips. Yet the parallel extends even further: like Pollock’s paintings, Saret’s wire constructions evoke a sense of natural growth, referencing both biological phenomena and the accumulation of data. His art thus establishes a dual mode of encounter—sensory and conceptual—that places the viewer in a continual flux between sensation and thought, perception and analysis. This experience of duality and perpetual unrest directly links Saret to the broader narrative of Post-Minimalism.
This state of in-betweenness is further illuminated by Pincus-Witten’s account, which contends that Post-Minimalism was not so much a rupture with Minimalism as a progression toward greater creative freedom—a direct challenge to inherited limits of form and space. Saret exemplifies this evolution by reimagining gesture, material, and process to transform sculpture into a three-dimensional extension of gestural abstraction. Central to his practice is an interest in Transcendentalism—shaped by an engagement with Eastern philosophies in the early seventies—and what he calls “Number Stuff,” an esoteric mode of visual thinking in which mathematical relationships are made tangible. These concerns are integral to his wire sculptures, informing both their conception and form.
Saret’s philosophical and conceptual priorities set him apart from contemporaries such as Eva Hesse, Robert Smithson, Lynda Benglis, Bill Bollinger, Dorothea Rockburne, and Barry Le Va, who were primarily concerned with performativity and the inherent qualities of their materials. As such, their work is open-ended in meaning and characterized by a state of in-betweenness: between geometry and gesture, structure and dissolution, material and idea, presence and absence. Saret’s works diverge from those of his peers in that they are deeply rooted in transcendence and improvisation. This is especially evident in his early use of industrial materials—bent and folded chicken wire and chain-link fencing—selected not to simply affirm their own physicality or challenge traditional notions of sculptural mass but so that Saret might explore their latent potentiality, openness, and malleability.
In his early, floor-bound and wall works, the geometry of the wire mesh became a “field” for manual twisting, layering, and weaving, processes that introduce variation, create complexity, and leave the trace of human gestures within the standardized industrial character of the material. Maintaining this ethos in later pieces, Saret refrains from imposing predetermined shapes, allowing the wire’s tensile properties—pliability, spring, and the capacity to hold a curve or knot—to guide each composition. The resulting forms hover between intention and accident. Saret’s improvisational process of twisting, bunching, pulling, and unfurling lengths of wire invites forms to emerge organically, never settling into fixed or easily decipherable objects.
Taken together, these qualities converge to create works that function as perceptual matrices: open, floating structures whose emptiness evokes the very fabric of the universe, from molecules to galaxies. Operating as networked systems—simultaneously entropic and algorithmic—they stage ongoing oscillations between the material and the immaterial, vision and touch, intention and accident. Through this ever-shifting dynamic, Saret’s sculptures challenge and expand the boundaries of the medium, inviting us to engage both physically and conceptually with the tension between visible reality and the abstract architectures that underlie it.
