Sculptor Who Defined Minimalism Dies at 88

Robert Grosvenor, a sculptor whose idiosyncratic works flirted with the aesthetics of Minimalism, only to strike out on his own and create pieces that were totally unclassifiable, died in New York on Wednesday at 88. His death was confirmed by Paula Cooper Gallery, which did not state a cause.

Grosvenor gained acclaim in New York during the 1960s when he showed his work alongside famed Minimalists, appearing in such shows as the era-defining “Primary Structures” at the Jewish Museum in 1966. But the sculptures made by Grosvenor in the following decades diverged from Minimalism, even though these works, too, were spare and made from industrial materials.

Related Articles

His art took many forms, all of them beguiling. He crafted gigantic steel forms that extended down from the ceiling, cutting through largely vacant galleries. He chopped up heavy wood beams and applied to them creosote, a material typically used to strengthen rail ties. He produced sculptures that looked like cars, with wheels, taillights, and all, that were off-putting because he had altered their look ever so slightly, sometimes by causing their surfaces to appear rough.

The artist rarely explained his works, leaving critics to wonder what exactly they meant. The critic John Yau spent the bulk of a review pondering how best to interact with Untitled, a 2020 sculpture in which a pool of water sits atop rubber liner encased in a rectangle of stacked cement blocks. “In the pool of water that perfectly reflects the ceiling above, he has made a work that is open and accepting of the world, while quietly rejoicing in its changing material condition,” Yau wrote in his review for Hyperallergic. “He reminds us that nothing is forever.”

That work, like many others by Grosvenor, was titled Untitled. The choice not to supply explanatory names for much of his works was deliberate. “It felt more complete, simpler—not pegging down the works so much and leaving them open,” Grosvenor once said in an interview for the Brooklyn Rail.

The peculiarity of his art—and the strangeness of his career arc—was one reason Grosvenor found so many admirers. Roberta Smith, writing in the New York Times, once described that arc like so: “Robert Grosvenor is the lone wolf of sculpture. In the late 1960s he was almost a Minimalist, but was disqualified by a growing penchant for working with rough materials, scrappy found objects and his own hands. Since then his career has unfolded in singular surprises.”

Grosvenor gained some level of fame during the early part of his career, appearing in two editions of Documenta, a storied exhibition that occurs once every five years in Kassel, Germany, and showing with closely watched gallerists like Paula Cooper and Virginia Dwan.

But in recent years, having proven himself as an artist tough to place within any movement, Grosvenor’s art has continued to pop up in unusual places. In 2022, for example, his art appeared in Cecilia Alemani’s Surrealism-inspired Venice Biennale, where he was one of the oldest living participants and one of just a few male artists included. Grosvenor died just days after a survey of his work opened at the Fridericianum museum in Kassel.

Robert Grosvenor was born in New York in 1937 and was raised in Newport, Rhode Island, and Arizona. During the 1950s, he departed the US to study art at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, feeling as though he “had had enough of boarding schools” in America, as he once put it. He received a classical education and was discouraged from looking at artists like Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni, whose experimental practices broke with the norms of painting and sculpture during the postwar era. “So immediately,” he said, “I was attracted to Fontana and Manzoni. I usually don’t go along with what people tell me to do.”

He returned to the US in 1959, having been called into military service. But he never saw combat: he recalled mainly just marching around New York. While he was doing his military service, he came across art magazines and read about a show by the sculptor Mark di Suvero that was featured in one of them. Grosvenor then befriended di Suvero, who introduced him to other artists.

Grosvenor started to make works that he described as “paintings that came off the wall,” though he didn’t keep them because he said he “didn’t feel that confident about them.” He then moved on to sculpture, with his first fully three-dimensional work, a 1965 wood and steel piece called Topanga, appearing to rise off the floor before coming back down toward it.

He showed Topanga at Park Place, a New York cooperative where Paula Cooper served as director. Through her own gallery, Cooper would continue to represent Grosvenor through the present. (Karma and Galerie Max Hetzler also now represent the artist.)

Grosvenor grew more ambitious in the works that followed Topanga. At “Primary Structures,” the 1966 Jewish Museum show, Grosvenor showed Transoxiana (1965), another wood work that created a V shape by coming down from the ceiling before rising back up. Untitled (1968–70), a steel work that Grosvenor painted white, was suspended from the ceiling, where it hovered over the heads of viewers. (That latter work was memorably recreated by Grosvenor for the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami in 2018.)

During the 1970s, Grosvenor began makings sculptures using wood beams. Working with pine and found wooden telephone poles, Grosvenor sawed and broke his materials, in ways that some critics described as violent. “What is left is beautiful, but not because anything has been added, and not because any preexisting but hidden beauty has been revealed,” wrote critic Joseph Masheck in Artforum. To these beams, he applied creosote, a material that is toxic and pungent.

In recent years, Grosvenor has sculpted cars and boats, a habit partly inspired by his time spent in the Florida Keys, where he had a house. He often spent months at a time on a single one of these works, honing them gradually.

He remained modest about his process, telling the Rail, “I work regularly and very quickly, but there are a lot of mistakes. I guess that’s why my production isn’t so big.”