Robert Grosvenor, whose work resisted inventive classification for greater than six many years, died in Lengthy Island, New York, on Wednesday, September 3, on the age of 88. His demise was introduced by Paula Cooper Gallery, which has represented the artist because the gallery opened in 1968.
Grosvenor was primarily recognized for large-scale summary sculptures, though his oeuvre additionally encompassed pictures, drawing, and collage. He first gained recognition within the Sixties, taking part in seminal Minimalist group exhibitions like Main Constructions (1966) on the Jewish Museum and Minimal Artwork (1968) on the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag. He typically used unorthodox industrial supplies and toyed with ideas of spatial dynamics and performance, all with a dry wit and opaqueness that, at occasions, perplexed his viewers.
Grosvenor charted his personal inventive path, diverging from Minimalism’s strict formalism. His numerous output spanned many kinds, from seemingly gravity-defying cantilevered metal buildings to fractured wood beams and the outer shells of automobiles set bluntly on the ground. He intentionally left a lot of his work untitled and offered little rationalization, as with a fancy 2020 sculpture composed of stacked cinder blocks, rubber lining, and stagnant water that artwork critic and Hyperallergic contributor John Yau described as “easy and brilliantly economical in its development” whereas additionally “humorous and beneficiant.”
“Grosvenor is ready to stroll proper as much as the road separating artwork from perform with out crossing over or commenting on it,” Yau wrote. “That’s his reward, and I don’t know of one other sculptor who has it.”
Born in New York Metropolis in 1937, Grosvenor grew up in Rhode Island and Arizona. As a teen, he studied artwork and design in Europe, receiving a classical schooling on the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Dijon, the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and the Università de Perugia in Italy. As a pupil, he discovered inspiration in experimental artists like Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana, and Piero Manzoni, he instructed the Brooklyn Rail in a 2019 interview.
After returning to the US in 1959 to finish a six-month navy service requirement, he moved to New York, the place he cast friendships within the artwork scene. He grew to become acquainted with members of the cooperative Park Place Gallery, directed by Paula Cooper, and the Inexperienced Gallery, which gave an early platform to artists together with Yayoi Kusama, Mark di Suvero, and Donald Judd. He described his artwork of that point to the Brooklyn Rail as “work that got here off the wall,” and in 1962 he started exhibiting it in group reveals.
In keeping with Paula Cooper Gallery, he felt that his profession started with the 1965 exhibition of “Transoxiana” — a 31-foot angular cantilevered sculpture that was later featured within the pivotal present Main Constructions alongside works by Judd and such different Minimalist pioneers as Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, and Anne Truitt. He additionally garnered approval for his dynamic geometric works, as in “Topanga” (1965), which he constructed after seeing an image of an enormous photo voltaic telescope in Arizona’s Sonoran desert, and an untitled all-white metal construction from 1968–70 that hovers midair from cables hooked up to the ceiling. The latter was featured in his first solo present at Paula Cooper Gallery.
Departing from the Minimalist motion in the course of the ’70s, Grosvenor experimented with wood sculptures constructed from damaged lengths of pine planks and located phone poles. Resting horizontally on the bottom, they featured symmetrical fractures, and at occasions had been blackened with creosote, a poisonous, oily preservative. Within the following many years, he employed discovered supplies like corrugated metal and concrete blocks to create unclassifiable buildings that wavered between structure and sculpture. His most up-to-date works included vehicular flooring sculptures stemming from his lifelong fascination with vehicles and boats.
“His work of the previous twenty years was amongst his easiest, at occasions making that of youthful sculptors seem awfully conservative as compared. Compared? There was none. His was a world actually unto itself,” wrote curator Bob Nickas in a assertion for the New York Artwork Critics Affiliation.
All through his life, Grosvenor remained humble about his inventive course of.
“I make as a lot as I can,” he instructed the Brooklyn Rail. “I work frequently and really rapidly, however there are loads of errors. I suppose that’s why my manufacturing isn’t so huge.”
Greater than 30 of the artist’s works are presently on view in a solo exhibition on the Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany, which continues by January 2026. His items are additionally held within the collections of quite a few establishments, together with Storm King Artwork Middle and the Museum of Trendy Artwork in New York, the Walker Artwork Middle in Minneapolis, and the Institute of Up to date Artwork in Miami.
