Cynthia Reeves Gallery Acquires JONATHAN PRINCE Light Box

Jonathan Prince, a sculptor whose recent works were the subject of a solo exhibition at CYNTHIA-REEVES in Chelsea, has placed a key sculpture, Light Box, in the noted collection of 20th- and 21st-century art of Julie and Edward J. Minskoff.

Mr. Minskoff, President of Edward J. Minskoff Equities, Inc., a New York-based real estate acquisition and development company, creates buildings that are widely acclaimed as art forms themselves. Mr. and Mrs. Minskoff generously display much of their art collection in public view throughout their buildings. Light Box is now installed in the lobby of the former IBM Building at 590 Madison Avenue in New York, alongside works by Robert Indiana, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, John Chamberlain, Kenny Scharf, and Alexander Calder.

Prince developed Light Box after reading an article in The New York Times Magazine about dark matter. The article describes how matter actually consists mostly of empty space. This was the beginning of a body of work that explores how sculptural volumes can be created with minimal mass.

Light Box is a near perfect cube (32" by 32" by 32") of Zimbabwe black granite with twenty-five four-inch diameter holes drilled through all six sides. The weight (or mass) of a granite block of this size would be approximately 4,000 pounds. As a result of the multiple perforations, the mass of Light Box is only twenty-five percent of what a comparable volume of granite should weigh, or 1,000 pounds.

The black cube has been used as a symbol through the millennia to represent perfection in mathematics and geometry. Perhaps the cube's most significant appropriation is through religion: Islam, Judaism and the Occult all use the black cube symbolically.

The cube as an expression of perfect geometry has been used to great advantage by the artist Donald Judd, whose quest for "clarity in the constructed object" led him to work extensively with the "box". Reference to Judd's mastery is given in the title of this sculpture. Additional artists of note include Charles Ray, whose "Ink Box" (1986) is considered a post-modern masterpiece.