This is a very rare, poignant early etching done at mid century by the famous American sculptor Louise Nevelson. A bright strong impression, hand signed and numbered from an edition of only 16.

This work is fully referenced in the catalogue raisonne of Louise Nevelson's printed works by Gene Baro.

"Louise Nevelson was an anomaly among her contemporaries in the 1950s. While such prominent sculptors of the post-World War II era as David Smith and Mark di Suvero espoused a sculpture of permanence—using welded steel in large, predetermined compositions and fixed configurations—Nevelson worked primarily in the more malleable material of wood and composed her works as she went along. It is perhaps inevitable that she would have evolved a working method modeled on the fluid movements of performance rather than on the structured permanence of most mid-century sculpture, for she was first introduced to the arts through theater and voice lessons in the 1920s. Beginning in the 1930 and for many years thereafter, she was also a student of modern dance. Her intuitive method of sculptural construction and the stage-set presence of her wall reliefs and environments owe much to these formative influences." - The Whitney Museum of American Art

Louise Nevelson was one of the most important American sculptors of the twentieth century, whose works can be found in almost every major museum in Europe and America. Louise Nevelson was born Louise Berliawsky on September 23, 1899, in Kiev, Russia. By 1905, her family had emigrated to the United States and settled in Rockland, Maine. In 1920, she married Charles Nevelson and moved to New York. At this time, she studied visual and performing arts, including dramatics, with Frederick Kiesler. Nevelson enrolled at the Art Students League in 1928 and also studied with Hilla Rebay. During this period, she was introduced to the work of Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso. In 1931, while traveling in Europe, she briefly attended Hans Hofmann’s school in Munich. Nevelson returned to New York in 1932 and assisted Diego Rivera on murals he was executing under the WPA Federal Art Project. Shortly thereafter, in the early 1930s, she turned to sculpture. Between 1933 and 1936, Nevelson’s work was included in numerous group exhibitions in New York, and in 1937 she joined the WPA as a teacher for the Educational Alliance School of Art. She studied etching with Stanley William Hayter at his Atelier 17 in New York in 1947, and in 1949–50 worked in marble and terra-cotta and executed her totemic Game Figures. In 1959 Nevelson participated in her first important museum exhibition, Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Martha Jackson Gallery gave her a solo show. She was included in the Venice Biennale in 1962.