Remembering Robert Grosvenor
Robert Grosvenor (b. 1937, New York, NY; d. 2025, Long Island, NY) eluded artistic categorization during his more than sixty-year career, producing diverse, singular works that explore the spatial dynamics between object, architecture, and viewer. Known primarily as a sculptor, his work also includes photography, drawing and collage. Grosvenor was an “artists’ artist” whose work was widely revered by younger artists especially, and consistently provided inspiration to his peers and the generations that followed.
A major exhibition of Grosvenor’s work is currently on view at the Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany (August 30, 2025–January 11, 2026). Organized on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of documenta, this is Grosvenor’s first institutional one-person exhibition in Germany and the first comprehensive museum presentation of his work in Europe in two decades. The exhibition includes over thirty works from all phases of Grosvenor’s career—from the early minimalist forms to the experimental, humorous sculptures and photographs of the following decades.
Grosvenor was educated at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Dijon (1956); the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris (1957-1959); and the Università de Perugia (1958). He considered his career to have actually begun with the exhibition of Transoxiana (1965) in a group show at the New York artist’s cooperative Park Place. The cantilevered work descended from the ceiling to the floor and back up again in the shape of a V, spanning thirty-one feet, and was subsequently included in Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum (1966), a seminal exhibition that helped define minimalism. Two years later Grosvenor presented another (untitled) cantilevered sculpture on an even larger scale in Minimal Art at Gemeentemuseum Den Haag (1968), the exhibition that introduced minimalism to European audiences.
Robert Grosvenor began working with Paula Cooper in 1965 as a member of the Park Place cooperative, where Cooper was the Director until its closure in 1967. The Park Place Gallery was the first large-scale artists’ cooperative active in New York, and during its six years of operation it hosted groundbreaking exhibitions of painting and sculpture. After the cooperative closed, Grosvenor joined the Paula Cooper Gallery when it opened at 96-100 Prince Street in 1968.
Grosvenor’s first exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery took place in 1970, setting the precedent for future presentations to come with a single monumental untitled sculpture in white plywood and steel suspended between ceiling and floor and dramatizing the surrounding space. Another twenty-five one-person exhibitions of Grosvenor’s work at the Paula Cooper Gallery’s various locations followed.
Following the large-scale interventional sculptures of the 1960s Grosvenor made several outdoor pieces that followed and emphasized the horizontal, and from 1972 onwards he began working with wooden beams and poles, sometimes blackened with creosote. These works, as with his subsequent sculpture, always rested directly on the ground. Around 1990 Grosvenor began using found materials, occasionally combining them with fabricated ones in increasingly idiosyncratic but consistently impressive large-scale singular works. Throughout his career Grosvenor has, among other interests, explored a fascination with cars. Although his interest in vehicular forms dates back to the 1960s, it was from the early 2010s onwards that Grosvenor focused on transforming obsolete vehicles into inoperable sculptures.
Throughout his career Grosvenor has been honored with one-person exhibitions at prestigious international institutions such as P.S.1, New York (1984); Centre d'Art Contemporain du Domaine de Kerguehennec à Bignan, Locmine, France (1989); Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (1992); the Fundação de Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2005); the Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL (2017); the ICA Miami (2019) and the Fridericianum, Kassel (2025–2026). Important group exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial exhibitions of 1973 and 2010, Documenta 6 (1977) and Documenta 8 (1987), and the Venice Biennale (2022). In 2025, Grosvenor was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which awarded the artist a grant in 1974.
Robert Grosvenor’s work is in the collections of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Storm King Art Center, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Omi, Ghent, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Renaissance Society, Chicago; the ICA Miami, FL; Museum Boymans, Rotterdam; Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; the Serralves Museum, Porto; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and BY ART MATTERS, Hangzhou, China.
