Robert Grosvenor

Since the 1960s, Robert Grosvenor (b. 1937) has produced a diverse oeuvre, encompassing his primary medium sculpture, alongside a selection of photographs and works on paper. Through a strong material presence, his works question notions of balance and imbalance, mass and line, movement and stagnation, baring the complexities and contradictions of spacial dynamics. Although presenting a minimalist aesthetic, Grosvenor’s sculptures and objects have never adopted Minimalism’s programmatic claims. Rather, they are imbued with a certain sensual directness. In a playful and mischievous way, the artist explores the limits of materials and forms, combining and confronting seemingly dissimilar elements within a given space.

‘Robert Grosvenor’s works are strange not only, and perhaps not even primarily, because of the forms and materials that they use. They are strange because of the structure of inversion that informs them. This structure closes the works in upon themselves, and bends all references (strange or not) back on the sculpture itself. […] One stands in front of the sculpture […] one walks around it, enters its space, sees everything, recognizes everything, and is still not in a position to make it match up with what these things usually are. […] There is nothing but to accept the sculpture and its individual elements as that what they are under the conditions of this sculpture. It protects the sculpture and its elements against all kinds of consumption.’

U. Loock, ‘Perfect Ambiguity’, in Robert Grosvenor, Museu Serralves, 2005