Ronald Bladen’s three-part geometric sculpture exploits the ambiguous tension between the natural and the nonobjective worlds, coupling a sense of extreme physicality with precariousness. The dynamic effect of the sculpture is compounded by the negative spaces between its identical components, each tilted at a sixty-five-degree angle. Originally made of wood and aluminum facing, Untitled (Three Elements) was subsequently fabricated in steel so that it could be installed outdoors. At the time of its facture, steel was appreciated for its perceived durability in many different climates and for its ability to accurately reproduce geometric forms.

Bladen began his artistic career as a painter in San Francisco, where he had moved in 1939 from his native Canada, and participated in the active community of poets and other artists there. He moved to New York in 1956. In the early 1960s he experimented with collage and relief sculpture, and by 1965 his work expanded dimensionally when he began making room-size sculptures of simplified geometric shapes. These wood constructions had smooth, painted exteriors that masked their complexly engineered interior scaffolding. Bladen’s earliest sculptures of this type were multicolored; Untitled (Three Elements) inaugurated a series of starker mature works. The original wood-and-aluminum version of the sculpture was included in Primary Structures, a landmark exhibition of Minimalist art at the Jewish Museum in New York, where it was first shown publicly, in 1966.