Galerie Max Hetzler is pleased to present an exhibition of a single sculpture by Robert Grosvenor from July 2 to August 6 2005 at Holzmarktstraße 15-18.
Albatrun (2002) is Robert Grosvenor's most recent sculpture: a work with a large flat, vertical leaf-like shape in yellow with two holes is standing upright on a large base. It is accompanied, at some distance, by another set of antenna-like steel-rods.
The sculpture derives from a picture Robert Grosvenor saw in an architectural guide from the sixties, a badly printed black and white illustration of a sculpture in a public space, erected in a small town in Switzerland.
It is rather unusual that works by Robert Grosvenor can be traced back to photographs. Albatrun reproduces an already existing object, which remains astonishingly close to the model. That is not to say that Robert Grosvenor makes a detailed copy of the depicted object: the very quality of the photograph would not have allowed him to do so. The artist borrows the significant form: a symmetrical, rounded form, which could remind one of schematised face, a women's body or a lemon.
Robert Grosvenor's work since 1965 can be divided into several separated phases. The earliest of these is characterized by very large cantilevered sculptures. From 1968 on, the artist constructed several works in the landscape as well as in relation with the horizon. He made his first linear work 1972 in wood with saw-cuts and breaks, and in 1976 the first block-shaped work out of girders. The year 1983 represents a deep caesura in the course of the previous work – it begins a phase of heterogeneous sculpture, which has lasted until the present day.
Unlike main Minimalism, Robert Grosvenor's sculptures dispense with the earnestness and the intellectual gravity of the period. His objects are playful, capricious, or mischievously thoughtful. Unlike the structuralists who approached the multiplicity of meanings with scientific meticulousness, the artist's structuralist attitude consists of a purely sensuous immediacy. He seems more concerned with what the Japanese linguist Toshihiko Izutsu once called "fundamental magic of meaning": embedding a glimpse of magic, the pleasant surprise of the unknown, into the very semantic construction of high objects, recognizing that the objects of our daily life are vague, unanalyzed, and blurred in meaning, often surrounded by an aura of impressions, emotions and expectations.
Upcoming exhibitions:
Arturo Herrera
September 9 – October 29, 2005
gallery space Holzmarktstraße
Leonardo Drew/ Kara Walker
September 9 – October 22, 2005
gallery space Zimmerstraße
