Carl Andre: Mass & Matter, Turner Contemporary, Margate, review In a throwback to curatorial fashions of the period, the installation, in a single gallery, feels satisfyingly dense - which is appropriate in another sense, too, since Andre's work is about the properties of humble, unaltered materials such as lead, wood and brick. In Phalanx (1981), two rows of seven rough-hewn timber posts form a kind of arrowhead pointing at the viewer. Timber Piece (Well) (1964/1970), consists of 28 thick chunks of wood stacked into an imposing block. Equivalent VIII hasn't been borrowed from the Tate, but we do see 60 x 1 Range Work (1983), a line of triangular brown bricks extending from a wall like an enormous bar of Toblerone. There are also several examples of Andre's famous floor sculptures: panels of weather-beaten and oxidised aluminium, copper, steel, magnesium, lead and zinc, arranged to form geometric patterns like gigantic chessboards, or disco-era dance floors. Visitors are invited to walk on 4 x 25 Altstadt Rectangle (1967), a large strip of 100 worn metal plates, mottled with beautiful blotches of subtle colour, including slate grey and petrol blue. As you step across the work, the segments of hot-rolled steel clatter and shift: what appears solid has a precarious, impermanent quality. People often assume that Minimal art is cerebral and visually uninteresting - but a prominent characteristic of Andre's work is its sensuousness. It invites you to scrutinise, say, the knots, cracks and nubbly surfaces of solid timber, or the infinitesimal gradations of colour in ageing metal. I also detected something melancholic. Andre worked with simple industrial materials at a time when new technologies such as plastic risked rendering them obsolete. There is nothing fancy or pretentious about his art, which feels solid, rugged, honest - and nostalgic. As a teenager, he visited Stonehenge, and many of his sculptures are like 20th-century versions of prehistoric memorials. It is surely significant that the front cover of Quincy, a 1973 photographic book recording aspects of Andre's hometown in Massachusetts, features a dark gravestone, like a ready-made Minimalist sculpture. Whether or not Andre's art offers some kind of lament, there is no question about its influence. Richard Serra is open about his debt to Andre: "He changed the history of sculpture." Moreover, repercussions of Andre's idea that sculpture could be a "place," such as a zone marked out beneath your feet, as much as a thing, are still being felt today. There is nothing new or revelatory about this exhibition, but it should excite anyone being introduced to his work for the first time, and persuade doubters that Andre isn't a fraud. From January 29 until May 6; information: 01843 233000