Each of six identical steel cylinders, aligned side by side, seems to fall in the direction opposite from the one next to it. When viewed in profile, the sculpture appears as a three-dimensional X. Part of a series of works composed of varying permutations of cylindrical units, Untitled was created by William Tucker in 1968. Throughout the 1960s, Tucker, along with artists such as Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd, both of whom are also represented in Storm King’s collection, worked through this idea of repeating and combining identical units into increasingly complex or pared-down compositions. Speaking about his cylindrical works in the 1960s, Tucker said, “The influence of American minimalism is quite apparent, in the uniformity of the shape and relationship of the elements, their muted color, and the relationship to the ground plane.” 

While continuing to make large-scale, boldly geometric sculpture, Tucker made an important transition in later decades, when he turned away from the conceptual framework of Minimalism to focus on expressive, hand-modeled sculpture. Indeed, the seemingly gravity-defying cylinders of Untitled represent a throughline to Tucker’s later work, one concerned with bodily weight and motion. “Paradoxically,” Tucker explained, “the given simplicity of this unit allowed me to explore for the first time one of the central concerns of Western sculpture—the illusion of movement.”